


The Monsters That We Bear

by stele3



Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: AU, Cyborgs, Drug Use, M/M, Mentions of physical wounds, Parallax 'verse, Science Fiction, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-22
Updated: 2013-02-22
Packaged: 2017-12-03 07:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/695528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prequel to Parallax, by ignipes</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Monsters That We Bear

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Parallax](https://archiveofourown.org/works/298180) by [ignipes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes). 



_Some say now 'suffer all the children' and walk away a savior  
Or a madman and polluted from gutter institutions_  
Explosions echoed across the city. They were bombing the port and the noise reverberated in the narrow canyons of the streets. Strict curfews had been announced, but apparently the military police were busy enforcing it elsewhere, so this part of the city seemed completely empty. Not just empty, though -- lifeless. What few windows remained unboarded and unbroken were dark.  
  
Spencer stuck to the shadows for another block, flinching every time an explosion rattled between the buildings. The night air was bitterly fucking cold, dry as a bone and so windy Spencer's stolen clothes might as well have been made of gauze for all the protection they offered. At the port he'd overheard men saying the terraforming factories were gone and the atmosphere was collapsing. Violent storms, too little oxygen, too few ships to take people away: he'd seen it happen before.  
  
Spencer could only hope to be long gone by the time the planet suffocated. But if he couldn't find what he was looking for -- if he couldn't find a way to leave again -- there might be some kind of cosmic justice in that.  
  
He sprinted across another broad avenue, ignoring the ache in his legs and burning in his lungs. Ten miles across the city and he hadn't slept in - fuck, he couldn't remember when he last ate, or _stopped_ , just fucking stopped long enough to catch his breath, to think, to plan. He didn't even know if he was in the right place.  
  
No -- the place was right. He just didn't know if he was too late.  
  
He felt a thrill of something that might be fear, might be relief when he found the street he was looking for. Two days ago he'd bribed his way onto a low-level hover transport, riding along with other desperate refugees heading for the port; Spencer, though, had spent the entire trip with his eyes turned downward and his heart had pounded when, incredibly, improbably, he'd caught sight of an IC dish on a rooftop, aimed at the southern sky. The moment the hover had landed he'd started backtracking, guided only by his own quick glimpses of the city and driven by the knowledge that if he'd seen the dish, it wouldn't be long before someone else did, too.  
  
He rounded the corner and there was the tall grey apartment building in front of him. The door hung unlocked, broken, hanging open.  
  
Spencer finally took his pause, closing his eyes. The broken world swam around him. His father was dead, he'd gleaned that much from the last heavily-screened and censored letter from his mother. His mother, his sisters, they were gone somewhere, too, now, fled from a similar apocalypse on Nuevo Montenegro. Mom had said something bright and cheerful about how Jacqueline's new job was taking them off-planet for a while. He could only hope that they hadn't tried to tell him where to look. If they had, then he'd be the last to know. That was a good thing, he reminded himself: wherever they had wound up, they'd be safer if he never found them.  
  
 _Then what_ , a little voice whispered, _are you doing_ here?  
  
He almost turned away. If he was going to leave, he had to get back to the port before it was blasted to rubble.  
  
But he pulled the door open. The hinges shrieked, and Spencer darted inside and pressed himself against the wall. He waited, listening. No shouts. No footsteps. Nothing. He shoved away from the wall and tested the first few steps. They creaked under his weight but didn't crumble, so he climbed, pausing at each landing to peer down the long dark corridors of apartment doorways.  
  
Another bomb went off, this one close enough that the building shook around him. Dust fell from the staircase above him, drifting lazily past. Spencer paused to watch its descent.  
  
On the fourth floor, there was a door with faint light along the bottom.  
  
Spencer stood frozen in the stairwell, staring at it for a long time before he could make his feet stumble forward. This was pure dumb stupidity, a tip from one of his fellow Buckton graduates. Trevor had gone into Intelligence and Integrity Preservation and they hadn't stayed close -- the Alliance took great pains to assure no personal loyalties superseded their higher calling -- but apparently he'd still remembered enough of their friendship to send Spencer a message: a copied transcript of intel on the current whereabouts of known insurgents.  
  
Either no one had bothered to search for an escaped rebel on a dying planet, or they were already here and waiting for Spencer. Trevor might have been a setup. He might be walking into a trap. Or maybe they'd already come and gone, and he'd walk in to find a --  
  
Spencer reached the door. He stood in the dark hallway, his heart hammering. There was no sound from inside.  
  
Finally he lifted a hand, knocked, and quickly stepped sideways so that he wasn't standing directly in front of the door.  
  
Nothing moved. Then, faintly, he heard something fall down inside the apartment, followed by the pings of smaller things bouncing and rolling across the floor as if a rubbish bin had been tipped. Then more silence, even stiller than before.  
  
Spencer swallowed, wincing at the dry catch in his throat. The atmosphere had no moisture left to give, and was sucking it out of him where he stood. Any minute he'd transform in to a pillar of crumbling skin cells. It was so stupid, he should just run for it while he could, but... "Ryan?" he croaked. The sound echoed down the hall beyond the grasp of his mouth. "It's me, it's Spencer. Ryan?"  
  
He waited, braced. The door didn't explode outward under a hail of gunfire but after a moment the floor inside the apartment creaked and the thin line of light along the bottom flickered as someone moved to stand on the other side. Spencer's eyes fixed on the crooked place where the uneven door met its frame. When it finally opened he still startled backward, though, hand pressed against the wall and catching splinters.  
  
A sliver of pale, round face moved into the crack, peering out at him. Something swelled in Spencer's mind, pressing outward against his skull. He hadn't let himself think about how much he wanted this, not on his winding scramble across this dying planet nor on the long ride stowed away in the dark of a munitions freighter -- not in the long years before that, sitting alone in his cockpit surrounded by nothingness. Wanting didn't change anything but it had stayed and grown into something huge, into _need_. It burned in his veins, almost too much to bear, and he bit back tiny noises of fear and relief.  
  
"Spence?" Ryan said finally. He opened the door wider. His right arm was in a sling and there were dark circles around his eyes, but he was alive.  
  
"I'm alone," Spencer tried to say. His lips moved emptily around the words. He swallowed, flinching, and opened his mouth to rush out reassurances. He wasn't Alliance anymore, they hadn't sent him...  
  
Before he could, Ryan said, "Don't worry, they won't look for you here." He was still staring, an unmoving statue in the doorway, his eyes huge. His breath wheezed deep in his chest. Hairs rose on Spencer's neck.  
  
"I know some guys who can help," Ryan said, and shuffled back further to let him in.  
  
  
\--  
  
  


The A-NINE drug was invented as a brain supplement. It had all the same mental and psychological effects as REM sleep, without the long hours of inactivity; no signs of chemical dependency; no physical 'high' or other pleasurable sensations that might lead its users to abuse, beyond a slight buzz of adrenaline immediately after injection and the feeling of being rested. Its street name was the Stealth Snoozer.

Its results were nothing short of revolutionary. The Alliance had caught wind of the drug while it was still in the trial period and rushed it to mass production for use on the front lines. Productivity soared. One soldier could suddenly accomplish the work of two, operating twenty-four hours around the clock, with a few short breaks to treat weary muscles with protein shots and sessions of ERT. There was no reason to stop working, ever.

The Alliance used it primarily for long-range missions, and from thence came their empire. It came in especially handy during long-range planetary manuevers: they would give the transport pilots enough to last the whole journey, ensuring a safe delivery of grunts, munitions, or supplies. The actual attack forces would be put in stasis for the trip then awakened and given only enough doses of A-NINE to last them the course of the mission, ensuring the maximum, nonstop firepower from a relatively small force. It was a simple yet devastatingly effective system. The Alliance maintained that their domination of the known universe resulted from a heavenly mandate...but their monopoly on the A-NINE market helped.

  
  
  
\--  
  
  
"There's still plenty of water," Ryan said as he poured some into an ancient pot. "The shower sort of works, too, but you don't want to drink it straight. I've got to boil it. It'll take...a few minutes."  
  
Spencer nodded and listened to Ryan catch his breath as he moved around the tiny, dark kitchen. It was common for people to get respiratory ailments in new or dying atmospheres, when the terraforming factories couldn't get the right balance of air quality. Settlers called it the Terra-Lung. Spencer had gotten it once, as a kid, when there'd been a bad accident at one of the Nuevo Montenegro factories, and everyone had had to wear white airmasks for a month. It wasn't fatal. Ryan would be fine as soon as he got off this rock.  
  
The stove top had been cracked open and Ryan clumsily set the pot straight on the open flame; it wobbled in his hand and almost overturned before he got it safely settled. With a soft wheeze of relief, he leaned back against the wall beside the sink, which was basically a spigot sticking out of the wall and a bucket glued into place below.  
  
Even leaning against the wall, Ryan was holding himself gingerly. Maybe he'd broken some ribs. That'd explain the wheezing, and the immobilized arm. The only light came from a buzzing lamp in the ceiling that flickered with every distant explosion.  
  
It'd been years. Almost four. Ryan looked unreal -- he wore a big black sweater that hung loose on his shoulders and contrasted sharply with his pale, thin features. Part of Spencer was afraid to look away, as though Ryan's head and arms might disappear entirely and leave a huddle of cloth on the ground.  
  
Eventually the water started to boil. They'd been staring at each other in silence the whole time. Ryan blinked and turned away first, using the sleeve of his sweater as an oven mitt to pick up the pot and pour the water into a battered cup. "You look like shit," he observed. Steam from the hot water curled in the air.  
  
Spencer nodded. It'd been a while since he'd been near a reflective surface, but he'd take Ryan at his word. "You look -- " he started to say, but trailed off. He couldn't think of how to finish. His throat hurt.  
  
Ryan paused with the cup in his hand and shot a quick look at Spencer from under his hair. His expression was suddenly wary, the way it hadn't been when he'd opened the door. Spencer wondered what he'd done wrong. He held still as Ryan crossed the narrow kitchen toward him. "Here. Careful."  
  
Automatically Spencer reached up to take the cup. His fingers brushed against metal. It moved. He froze, his gaze dropping from Ryan's face to the hand curled around the cup. Two of Ryan's fingers -- the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand -- were gray and smooth, featureless. They flexed as he watched and shone dully in the light. When he looked up, Ryan's expression had gone blank except for his eyes; he'd never been able to hide anything in his eyes. They were wide and afraid.  
  
"Thanks," Spencer said. Ryan's artificial fingers slid out from under his. Spencer suppressed a shudder then immediately wanted them back. He raised the cup to his face, not drinking but letting the steam slide across his mouth and cheeks. He imagined the pores of his skin sucking desperately. His mind raced.  
  
Swallowing, he croaked, "What -- " at the same time Ryan started, "How did you -- "  
  
They both stopped and Ryan waved his hand for Spencer to go, his expression tense. The gesture glinted briefly.  
  
"What're you doing here?" Spencer asked. That wasn't what he'd been going to ask, but Ryan's shoulders were rigid.  
  
Ryan shot him another quick glance, like he knew Spencer had caught himself back. "I'm here to report on the reallocation."  
  
"For the -- "  
  
"Yes. So far the Alliance has been good at suppressing information, so that's the first step towards building a more cohesive resistance force." Ryan sounded like he was reciting something from a manual. He moved away, switching off the stove and putting the pot into the bucket-sink; it hissed as it connected with water. "Whenever they announce that a planet is being 'reallocated' or their treaties are being revised or whatever, we try to get someone on the surface to report what's actually happening."  
  
He was still messing with stuff in the kitchen, his back turned. Spencer felt cold and sick. He shouldn't have come here. He took a sip of the water, wincing as the hot liquid poured over the cracks in his lips.  
  
"Dad died," Ryan said without turning.  
  
Spencer swallowed, letting the water slide down his throat, and nodded. "I know. Mom -- I'm sorry, Ryan." He meant it, even if he couldn't feel it.  
  
"They left." Ryan turned to face him, a frown between his eyes. "Your mom and your dad and your sisters. Did you ever -- ?"  
  
"No. I don't know."  
  
"They went to Centauri V first, I think. A lot of refugees did, but after that -- "  
  
"Stop. Don't." Spencer didn't want to know, didn't want to be tempted. The light hurt and he briefly squeezed his eyelids closed. "The Alliance will be looking for me. It's better if I don't know." He takes another sip, then adds, "I'm pretty sure my dad died, too." He couldn't feel that, either.  
  
Ryan fell silent. The light buzzed on and on above them. Spencer rubbed a hand over his face. It felt like he'd forgotten how to talk. It's not like he'd done a whole lot of that recently, but still. "I didn't," he tried, fumbling for the words, "I don't -- I shouldn't have come here, I'm sorry, but there's no place else, I don't know where they went."  
  
"How did you find me?" Ryan asked, looking at Spencer sideways.  
  
"They know you -- " Spencer cut off. Telling Ryan about the Alliance intel would put Trevor in danger; the rebels would change the encryption on their datastream and it'd be obvious that they'd been alerted by an inside source. He closed his eyes again. Trevor had to have known he'd warn Ryan. And even if he didn't, it was only a matter of time: the Alliance had spies in every rank and constant surveillance. They'd find Trevor sooner or later. If it became sooner because of Spencer -- well, he'd already done worse things in his life. "They've hacked your datastream."  
  
When he opened his eyes, Ryan's were huge. "They know I'm here?"  
  
"Yeah. Not -- where, they know you're transmitting from the planet's surface but they don't know where. I had to look -- I think they're waiting for your evac, to get you all at once. Whoever's coming to pick you up, you've gotta call them off."  
  
Ryan studied him for a long moment -- deciding whether or not to believe him, Spencer thought -- then pushed away from the wall. A mess of wires overflowed off the table and curled along the floor. He flipped open a small-screen tablet and hooked his good hand into a pointer glove, tapping at the code that immediately popped up. Spencer turned away. The less he knew about Ryan's friends, the better.  
  
Now that he was looking around him, Spencer realized that the small, dirty apartment was covered with enough equipment to talk to another fucking solar system, which was probably exactly what Ryan used it for; he'd never been good at mechanics, but Ryan had an uncanny gift with any kind of communication device. As a kid Spencer had torn the radio out of an ancient ship in the junkyard not far from their apartment building and brought it home. Ryan had acted like the sputtering, jagged mess was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen; they'd been thirteen and fourteen and it had been Ryan's birthday, and he'd kissed Spencer, briefly, still laughing, before running off to steal some of his dad's tools. Spencer had stood frozen in the middle of his bedroom, his heart beating fast, until Ryan had come back and stood in the doorway, looking at him silently.  
  
He looked down at the water cupped between his hands. There was dirt under his nails. A few feet away, Ryan's pointer glove clicked quietly against the screen. Spencer kept glancing over at him; he couldn't stop himself. The last time he'd seen Ryan had been the night before he'd enlisted. They'd fought. They'd been fighting for months but that last night...Ryan had said, _You think they'll, it won't be any different with you, if you even_ come back, _you'll be just another -- I swear, I won't,_ and Spencer had screamed over him, trying to drown Ryan out, _So fucking don't, you can stay here and fucking rot and starve for all I care_.  
  
The next day, Spencer had gone down and signed up with the Alliance. That'd been the end of -- of everything, of childhood, of family, of friendship. Everything Spencer had known up to that point. But of all that he'd left behind, he remembered that moment the best: Ryan staring at him with clenched fists and flat eyes, spitting out _don't come back._  
  
"Spence?" Ryan said. He was waiting, his gaze a little uncertain.  
  
"Shit, sorry. What?"  
  
"There were others, in the city -- I think most everyone's down by the ports." _Why the hell are you telling me this?_ Spencer thought wildly, almost angry, but Ryan just kept going. "We haven't heard from them in a few days. We thought they'd just...but. Do you think the Alliance...?"  
  
"I don't know. Probably. They're probably searching every ship that launches. I didn't see the full intel report, just the part with your name." He couldn't talk about Trevor. Ryan might remember him, they'd all hung out together as kids. He wouldn't want to know that this was probably going to get Trevor killed. Spencer's head felt as twisted as the wires tangled on the floor. Thoughts kept coming at him from weird angles. "If they've been captured then the Alliance will get everything they know. There's -- this thing, this nerve chamber, takes away all your senses..." There, finally Ryan was looking at him like he should, big eyes with a frown line in between. "You've got to assume you've been compromised completely."  
  
Ryan bit at his lip. Words turned in his head; Spencer could see them behind his eyes, but he couldn't concentrate. He looked at the datastream port, the cracks in the floor, the dilapidated cupboards, before his eyes forcibly dragged themselves back to Ryan, who said, "We'd planned to bribe one of the captains to let us aboard his ship with forged passes. That was our escape plan, but -- there's an old abandoned airfield a few miles south of the city. It was Alliance and they disabled most of it when they left, but our engineer...do you remember Brent, Brent Wilson? He joined the resistance, too. He's here. He's been out there a couple times and he says there's a few working ships."  
  
Spencer's heart thumped. "A ship? You have a working ship and a place to launch?"  
  
"Yeah. We never told the others, it was just a backup plan."  
  
"I'm a pilot."  
  
"I know."  
  
The room seemed to waver around them. Spencer licked his lips and put the cup aside, twisting his fingers together so he didn't start trembling. "How'd...?"  
  
Ryan looked away. Apparently he didn't have any kind of problem taking his eyes off Spencer. "Your mom told me. You got into flight school right before I left."  
  
Oh. Of course. Right. "You still haven't told me what kind of ship," he said, trying to keep his voice steady.  
  
"It's a Sargas dual-mag, about twenty years old but it's got a newer core. Can you fly it?"  
  
Spencer could fly a Sargas in his sleep. Or he could, before. It'd been a while but he could if that's what it took to get off this planet. "Yeah," he says. "I can." Right now, he wanted to say, I found you, you're alive, let's get the fuck out of here before they come for me, or you, or both of us. Spencer's legs itched, unused to being still. He closed his mouth and kept quiet. He couldn't ask yet if Ryan wanted him to -- if the people Ryan knew would want him along, wherever they were going.  
  
"I can get Brent on the short-range transmitter, it's not hooked up to the datastream. I'll see what he says."  
  
The soles of Spencer's feet ached. He shifted them inside his boots. "What're you gonna tell him about me?"  
  
"The truth. You aren't the first Alliance deserter, Spencer. How did you even..." Ryan hesitated when Spencer tensed up, but he only asked, "How did you get here?"  
  
"Munitions freighter."  
  
Ryan stared at him. He was kneeling on the floor, using the other rickety kitchen chair as a desk. There were only a few feet between them. "You stowed away?"  
  
Spencer shrugged uncomfortably then winced, rolling his shoulders to ease some of the stiffness. It'd been a long, long ride in the dark.  
  
"Shit, you've gotta be starving, hold on, let me -- "  
  
"I'm good, I got some rations at the port." Spencer cleared his throat and scrubbed a hand through his hair. It was still short, cropped close to his head -- he needed to grow it out, maybe a beard, too -- but even at this length it was matted with sweat and dirt. "You said there's a shower?"  
  
"Oh. Yeah." Ryan sank back on his heels beside the chair. "Go ahead, it's right in there. I'm just gonna -- " He gestured at the screen.  
  
"Sure." Spencer hefted himself up and peeled off his jacket, putting it down on the chair seat. He didn't know what he'd been expecting but it felt weird to just walk back in here and drink Ryan's water, use his shower; he felt off-balance, still on edge.  
  
He made himself take a deep breath and ask, "Do you have a med dispenser?"  
  
"Uh. Yeah, are you -- oh." Ryan's face had frozen; he was craning his neck all the way back to look up at Spencer. The light cast sharp shadows around his nose, mouth. "Oh."  
  
Ryan's dad had been an Alliance pilot. After retiring he'd made good money in civilian transport, but most of it had funneled straight into the hands of a black marketer; the Alliance kept a tight rein on A-NINE -- for the public's own good, of course -- and finding it somewhere else came at a hefty price. The long, long, hot summer when Ryan had been eleven, money had been especially tight. It'd been A-NINE or food, so his dad had skipped some doses and spent most of the summer in the bottom of a bottle, while Ryan had spent most of it at Spencer's house. Just in case.  
  
There wasn't anything to say. Spencer waited, his stomach clenching. Eventually Ryan said, "There's a kit beside the door in the bathroom."  
  
"Thanks."  
  
"Don't thank me yet." Ryan hadn't gone back to the screen yet. His mouth crooked, but his eyes were troubled. "The water's not all that clean, and you've got to kind of hit the shower pipe to get it to work. There's a wrench in there."  
  
Spencer stared down at him. "Seriously?"  
  
Ryan rolled his eyes. "You want to fix it, be my guest."  
  
"Ryan Ross. Able to communicate with distant galaxies, but can't fix his shower." Spencer's mouth curved into an unfamiliar smile.  
  
"Hey, I didn't choose this place for its plumbing -- it had the best view around of the southern sky." His transmitter beeped and he turned back to it quickly.  
  
Metal glinted on the back of his bowed neck. Spencer froze again. Ryan, bent over the screen, didn't notice and after a moment Spencer walked past him into the bathroom, carefully shutting the door.  
  
  
\--   
  
  


It took a few years, but when the worst side effects of A-NINE had presented themselves, they were devastating.

There had always been a few hundred soldiers who didn't adapt well to the program. Their hearts gave out, they suffered exhaustion, or simply collapsed with no real discernible cause except their bodies falling out from under them. The Alliance had brushed aside their cases with ease, just as they had ignored reports of casualty rates that were much higher than strictly necessary.

Then an entire ship had gone insane.

And then another one.

Actually it had only been about 67.8% of the short-range fighters...which was exactly the percentage of the population, it turned out, who had difficulties returning to a natural REM pattern after using A-NINE for even a short period of time. This meant that even in stasis they suffered sleep-deprivation; combined with combat stress and closed quarters, this had created a volatile situation. In both cases, the transport pilots -- who never displayed any negative effects, being as they had never stopped taking the drug throughout their missions -- had subdued the disturbances by pumping more tranquilizing gas into the stasis chambers. Unfortunately the 32.2% of still-functional soldiers had been trapped in with their disruptive colleagues, and perished with them.

Sweeping evaluations of other units showed similar cases that, while they hadn't erupted into violence and insubordination yet, showed signs of heading in that direction. The scientist who invented A-NINE had quickly been stripped of his awards and purged for sabotage.

Of course that didn't mean that the Alliance stopped using the drug. They just stopped taking people off it; presumably soldiers intended to devote their entire life to serving the Chosen Alliance of Humankind, First and Only Among the Stars, so it was easier (if a bit more expensive) to keep them on it permanently.

By the time he showed up outside Ryan's fractured door, it had been three years, seven months, and nineteen days since Spencer had last slept.

  
  
  
\--   
  
  
The next morning Spencer went up to the roof to watch the first sun rise. It turned the sky into all kinds of alarming colors; the atmosphere was beginning to disintegrate into individual elements. If Spencer moved even the short distance between one corner of the rooftop to the other, stepping carefully around Ryan's IC dish, the spectrum of dazzling pinks and purples shifted with the change of angle. He squinted in the brightness, trying to mentally calculate. Judging from the speed of disintegration, they had a few weeks. In the east, there was a constant flurry of ships rising up into the sky. Likely there wouldn't be enough, and somewhere someone would get left behind in the slow suffocation of this dying world.  
  
He'd passed the night trying to strategize a way to keep from being one of them. Ryan's message would throw the Alliance off for a while; they might be more preoccupied with finding the traitor in their own midst than worrying about the two rebels left here. That wasn't something that Spencer liked to count on, though. If they had patrols in orbit there'd be a very small window of opportunity to jump after they got free of the atmosphere. Then they'd need to do a whole series of other jumps to throw off pursuit; a dual-mag Sargas could perform six consecutive jumps on a bad day, and if they landed the last one in the middle of a busy port it'd be easy to conceal them in traffic. He decided on Juther. Alliance presence would be high there, but the sheer number of ships worked in their favor as long as their pursuit didn't have some other way of finding them. There might be trackers on the ship that Ryan's engineer had found -- even derelict and abandoned, they might have left ways of tracing its movements. He'd go over it from top to bottom before they launched.  
  
He'd made himself lie down for a few hours last night. It'd felt strange to do so, but he didn't have an ERT chamber anymore to buzz his muscles back into working order. Spencer had never liked those things anyway: they made him feel claustrophobic and he'd always wondered what else they were doing to his body while he lay helpless inside.  
  
Lying on the nest of blankets and pillows that Ryan had made for him in the kitchen hadn't been a whole lot better. After switching to long-distance transport, he'd forgotten how lonely the nights got among people who actually _slept_. His skin had itched and his mind had raced. He'd only lasted about four hours; it wasn't enough but he didn't have a good gauge yet on how much time he'd have to spend lying down to make up for the lack of ERT. His feet still ached and he limped, cursing, as he made his way back downstairs.  
  
Ryan wasn't up yet. Spencer moved around the kitchen as quietly as possible, boiling some water on the stove and digging out a packet of protein spread from the cupboards. It was basic rationing foodstuffs, processed down to the most basic nutrients necessary for survival. He did locate a minor miracle: a jar of actual coffee grounds. It'd probably cost an arm and a leg on the black market.  
  
When Ryan padded into the kitchen, his hair askew and his eyes fuzzy with sleep, Spencer waved the jar at him. "How'd you get this?"  
  
Ryan yawned and sat down, blinking at his plate of foodstuffs. He'd taken his arm out of the sling. "Contraband."  
  
"Contraband coffee?"  
  
Grunting in affirmation, Ryan waved his empty cup at Spencer pointedly. His eyes were still half-lidded, fuzzy. A low pang of something hit Spencer's stomach; he tried to decipher it as he stood up to pour Ryan a bit of the hot water then gave up and sat back down, taking a deep breath. "So has your engineer gotten back to you yet?" He held the cup out.  
  
It was strangely symmetrical to last night, but this time Spencer was looking, was watching Ryan's hand as it reached out. It wasn't just a few fingers: metal lattice work covered the back of his hand and his wrist, disappearing up the sleeve of his shirt. Spencer swallowed hard, his own fingers feeling suddenly numb as Ryan took the cup from them.  
  
He didn't look away fast enough and when he finally lifted his gaze Ryan was frozen, staring at him through the steam over the edge of his cup. Spencer didn't know how to look away.  
  
Finally Ryan licked his lips, sipped from the cup, and said with his eyes on the table, "He hasn't heard from the others, either. He says we can definitely launch, though."  
  
"He'll need to start winding up the drive -- "  
  
"He fucking knows that, Spencer." Ryan pushed his chair back sharply, standing up and going to a drawer for a spoon. He stirred it at the counter, not coming back to his seat. "Brent's a good engineer. He knows his stuff."  
  
The collar of his shirt was too high for Spencer to get a better look at the metal he'd glimpsed last night. "And you trust him?"  
  
Ryan turned and started to fold his arms across his chest. In the middle of the motion he froze, pain twisting his face. "Yes," he said tightly. "We kind of have to."  
  
"I was thinking we could go to Juther and try to find a new ship there. Anything we find on the airfield here will probably be in the registry." Spencer rubbed his fingers absently back and forth around his cup, his mind slipping back over plans.  
  
Ryan dropped his right arm to his side. "I -- do you have that much credit?"  
  
"We wouldn't be _buying_ the ship, Ryan. What kind of rebel are you?"  
  
Snorting, Ryan lifted his cup again, with his left hand. "The kind that respects other people's possessions."  
  
Spencer smiled at him widely, mentally cupping his hands around the lighter mood. "If it makes you feel better, I promise we'll only steal from someone mean."  
  
Ryan paused with the cup under his mouth again. The light from outside shone on the metal of his fingers. Spencer kept his eyes on Ryan's face. "Polly Isaacs?"  
  
Polly Isaacs had been a pigtailed tomboy bully in their neighborhood. She'd also owned a cool rock collection and Ryan had spent three months steadily relieving her of all her finest gems then giving them to Spencer in odd and unexpected ways. He'd kept finding them under his pillow or inside his shoes. The memory brought back that feeling in his stomach, sort of a tight bundle of raw nerves. "I...don't know if Polly Isaacs has a ship in Juther," Spencer said, "but it's worth a shot."  
  
Ryan ducked his head, only the edge of his smile visible. Spencer's fingers twitched against the hot metal of his cup.  
  
They spent the rest of the day getting the IC dish and other equipment down from the roof, in case the Alliance sent out patrols into the city. Spencer did most of the work: Ryan had put his arm back in its sling. He caught Spencer looking and said shortly, "I fell on the stairs my first night here. Dislocated my shoulder."  
  
"Want me to have a look at it?"  
  
"No thanks." His tone brokered no discussion. Spencer didn't ask again.  
  
Instead he focused on unscrewing the makeshift communication tower and dismantling the various tangled cross-streams. It never failed to amaze Spencer how someone as mechanically incompetent as Ryan could hack together a two-way data port and transmitter with long-range capabilities out of things he'd obviously found in the gutter.  
  
"What're you smiling about?" Ryan's voice broke the silence.  
  
"You," Spencer answered unthinking. Then he stopped and straightened. Ryan had his head cocked to one side, watching him. "I mean," Spencer said, waving a hand at all the equipment strewn at their feet. "This. How'd you ever get this to work?"  
  
Ryan shrugged. "It took a while. If you listen long enough, though, there's always someone out there."  
  
"You'd listen for hours," Spencer said, his mind slipping back to the memory of Ryan lying on the floor of Spencer's bedroom, wearing a pair of headphones and occasionally twisting a knob or shifting a conduit bare millimeters. Sometimes Spencer had laid down next to him, his head twisted close to Ryan's; but he'd never had the patience to wait for the faint cadence of human voices to swell as Ryan zeroed in on the right frequency. Ryan had always been searching for something out there, and Spencer could only wait in silence. He ducked his head and went back to winding cords in a loop between his hand and his elbow.  
  
"Look," Ryan said presently. He was gazing upward. The sky above them had darkened in patches, and stars peeked through the purplish streaks of clouds. Bad sign -- they likely only had another couple of weeks before the atmosphere disintegrated entirely. Spencer tensed, mentally calculating a timeline; Ryan, though, went on in a soft voice, "Zabrodoha 16 and Escartion Alpha. The Green Queen and her little hunter on its leash."  
  
Spencer blinked, his eyes wandering over the sickly spots of light. "Can't believe you remember all those." There were as hundreds of constellations for every star system, and Ryan had avidly collected their stories from every book or traveler that had landed on Nuevo Montenegro. "You had that notebook -- you'd write down every one you ever heard of, even the ones people made up."  
  
"They were all made up," Ryan murmured. His voice was strained from craning his neck back so far. "They come in handy. Sometimes, when we need to talk on unencrypted channels, we use constellations to map coordinates. Right now we're the fourth puddle down on the walk outside the Green Queen's house."  
  
Spencer paused, shooting him a glance. "The fourth puddle of _what_?"  
  
Ryan's lips curved upward but he kept his eyes on the sky. "That's something the Alliance can't control: the stories that people carry, the myths that they tell each other. It's practically the only thing that still belongs to us. Even if they developed mind control, there are levels no one can reach, like, maybe they could make us all act however they wanted, but somewhere inside we'd still _feel_ , and we'd still believe in our own myths. Our lives, our planets, our bodies...they've taken everything else, but they can't make us change how we feel inside our own heads."  
  
He stood near the edge of the roof, framed against the multi-colored sky with one arm loose at his side and the other cradled tight against his chest, his head tilted back. Spencer stared until the sunlight made his eyes burn. He looked down at the tangle of wires in his hands, turning it over and over to find a loose end. "We need," he said, "we need to hurry up. We need to get out of sight in case somebody does a flyover. Does your, the engineer, is he being careful?"  
  
"Yeah," Ryan said.  
  
"Because if he's not, we're all fucked." Spencer fucking hated this, trusting everything to a quiet kid he barely remembered, but Ryan had told him that Brent joined the resistance after Nuevo Montenegro was reallocated. Nothing motivated people like revenge, unless it was idealism. "Can you map us a way to Juther?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Good." Spencer tossed the tangled wires into the upturned dish. "Come on, let's get this downstairs."  
  
Navigating the stairwell with an IC dish took all of Spencer's strength. Ryan helped as much as he could, one-handed and stumbling clumsily on the stairs. They got it down one flight then put it down in the hallway as Spencer warily kicked in a door. Ryan had assured him that this part of the city was entirely evacuated, but he still edged through the empty apartment, checking out every blind spot and closet. A family had lived here: he almost tripped on discarded toys in the hallway, and the wall by the door was marked with layers of pencil lines that rose in yearly increments, narrow with childhood and widening into adolescent growth spurts. Spencer ran his fingers over them as he passed. He wondered if the children here had survived, if they would grow up to seek out the resistance themselves, for revenge or ideals or both.  
  
He wondered how many people wanted revenge on him, without even knowing his name. If there was even someone left alive to hate him.  
  
When he walked back to the hallway he found Ryan leaning over with one hand on the IC dish. Spencer froze. "Ryan? You okay?"  
  
"Yeah," Ryan answered without opening his eyes. After a moment he straightened up. "Just winded." His breath wheezed softly in his throat.  
  
"You go downstairs," Spencer said. Ryan blinked at him, frowning in the musty, windowless interior of the apartment hallway and Spencer hesitated, tried again. "If you want? It's okay, I'll finish here. Why don't you, like, you can rest, if you want to."  
  
Ryan pushed his hand back through his hair and tugged at the ends. He did that when he was frustrated, he used to do that as a kid, when he was frustrated all the time. Spencer remembered slapping his hands away, telling him, _You'll go bald_. "Alright, fine," Ryan said. "I'll go -- are you hungry, I can make us something to...eat." He had to stop for breath. His mouth twisted angrily.  
  
"Sure," Spencer said then added, "Thanks."  
  
Ryan huffed and went off down the stairs. Spencer fussed with the wiring until he could hear the door close, two flights down. Then he stood for a long moment with his head bowed. He'd imagined this. He'd imagined plenty of things, some of which had become impossibilities by now -- going back home, finding his family -- but he had found Ryan. For fucking _years_ he'd imagined the things he'd say or do and they all seemed so useless now. Everything he said came out short and curt, colored with the sound of an order, and he couldn't just -- if he'd misunderstood years of unspoken tension or if that had all just simply faded with time and absence, then there was a chance that Ryan might freak out enough to leave him, or send him away. Spencer shivered. Losing Ryan now would...no. No, no. He cracked all his knuckles, shook his head at himself then seized the IC dish and dragged it jerkily into the apartment. The muscles in his back strained, spasming slightly when he straightened up. Fuck, he needed more rest. He'd lie down for a few hours before they went out to the airfield to meet up with Brent. Spencer reran the mental math as he headed back downstairs. He'd need to have a look at the ship, and Brent needed some time to fire up the drives and Ryan needed to find them coordinates that didn't include puddles or Green Queens.  
  
Back in the apartment, a few things had been set out on the table, small foodstuff and a knife. "Ryan?" Spencer called, approaching the bedroom slowly to give Ryan enough warning.  
  
He needn't have bothered; Ryan wasn't in his room. Spencer had a short moment to look around, taking in the rumpled sheets and the elaborate jacket hung neatly from the window latch, the colorful drawings and writing on the wall beside the small cot, the faint, familiar smell that was so specifically _Ryan_ , before his brain began panicking loudly. Something was very, very wrong, he could feel it: he had good instincts and luck, that's what everyone had always said. Something was wrong.  
  
He turned and went back down the hall. The bathroom door was cracked open. Spencer crossed to it with his mind thundering. "Ryan, are you -- "  
  
The bathroom was tiny, really just a shower stall with a toilet built into the side. Ryan sat on the closed lid, a med dispenser in one hand and his eyes closed. He'd taken his shirt off; his breath sounded labored.  
  
He'd taken his shirt off and Spencer gripped the edge of the door, suddenly unable to move. Ryan was mostly naked and half his body wasn't _him_ anymore: the entire right half of his chest, from his collarbone to the bottom of his ribcage, was polished, shining metal; steel ribbons branched off from that solid block, tracing the lines of his ribs around his sides; the edges where skin met metal were pinkish with scarring, as if the artificial parts -- _cybernetics_ , Ryan was a, a fucking _machine_ now -- had been forced into place. More narrow strips of metal ran down his arms and branched across all of his fingers, encircled his wrists, curving along both his collarbones.  
  
Ryan made a faint noise. He was looking back. The whites of his eyes showed. His shirt dangled loosely from one hand and he pulled it closer against his chest but didn't make any move to put it on. His lips parted but he said nothing, only stared. Cradled against his pale, flat belly, his right hand spasmed again and again, the fingers twitching in a way that Spencer instinctively knew Ryan had no control over. It looked like Ryan's hand was possessed.  
  
Spencer had no idea what he was feeling, desire or revulsion or both or neither. He flexed his own fingers, curling them in and then straightening them out to the point of pain. If he said something, it'd come out wrong, so he waited for Ryan to speak, and waited, and waited, and then stepped back and shut the door.  
  
  
\--   
  
  


Spencer had gone through basic training at Buckton Station. He wasn't alone. A lot of Nuevo Montenegro recruits got shipped there: some kids had only grown up a few hundred miles from him. The biggest shock, though, had been Trevor, who'd moved away from their old neighborhood years ago but had still vaguely remembered Spencer. They'd quickly become the center of their own little Nuevo Montenegro galaxy. All the recruits naturally tended to stick with others who shared the same language and customs; those unfortunate enough not to find anyone else from their home planet on the base wandered as satellites.

Nuevo Montenegro didn't have the most trainees at Buckton, but they were one of the most tight-knit groups. They watched each others' backs and cooperated on maneuvers even when they'd been placed on different teams. Spencer and Trevor had been made the unofficial leaders, despite the fact that Spencer had nearly been the youngest trainee on the whole damn station. Trevor, though, Trevor was older and tough and had been made a squad leader early on; he'd kept the training officers off their backs; he was the hero of any Nuevo Montenegro recruit with half a brain. He'd backed Spencer up all the way and that'd been more than enough for the others to overlook the fact that Spencer had still been short and chubby and all of fifteen years old. Trevor had been Spencer's hero too, in a different way from the others.

Those first six months had actually been _good_. Not what any of them had expected. The Alliance had always been a bogeyman in Spencer's mind, something huge that had swallowed him up -- _if you can't beat 'em, join 'em_ \-- but looking around at Trevor and the other kids, Spencer hadn't seen any monsters. For a while it had felt like _they_ could be different, that _this_ could be where things changed.

Years and years later, Spencer would realize this had been a deliberate strategy.

  
\--  
  
  
Brent was pretty much how Spencer remembered him, short and square-shouldered and quiet. "Wow," he said when Spencer and Ryan finished picking their way across the derelict airfield and the discarded rubble of ships. "Dude. Spencer Smith. You live."  
  
"I do," Spencer answered warily, but Brent didn't ask any questions beyond that, just led Spencer through the ship pointing out the things he'd had to fix and things he was still working on. Spencer thought, a bit uncharitably, that if everyone in the resistance was as trusting as Brent and Ryan, then it was no wonder why they'd had such limited success.  
  
The ship was passable, if old. Its age was probably what had kept it in once piece: all the newer models lying around the airfield had been more thoroughly disabled before being abandoned. Most of them had been commercial ships for private companies that the Alliance had confiscated right before the reallocation began; they hadn't wanted any unauthorized dealers profiting from refugees desperate to escape.  
  
"I found the core in one of the newer ships," Brent said. They were down in the engine room, Spencer doing a detailed checkup and Brent parking his butt near the hatch with his legs swinging. It made him seem so young. If he minded that Spencer was checking his work, it didn't show. "It's the same model, so the touchpoints should all respond just fine. I fired it up right after I put the new core in."  
  
Spencer paused; but if the Alliance had picked up on an engine signal, they would already have come for Brent. And at least that test was out of the way. He shortened his mental timeline by a day.  
  
They spent four hours firing up different systems without switching on the main power, with Brent still down in the engine room and Spencer up in the cramped cockpit. Small knickknacks littered the pilot console, a remnant of the last person to fly this beast: there were small figurines and smooth round pebbles of strange colors and a few emblems that looked religious in nature. Spencer would clean them out later but for now he let them lie. "Firing up the navigation system," he said into the headset.  
  
Behind him, Ryan said, "You want me to start plugging in coordinates?"  
  
The console to Spencer's right flickered on. In its yellowish glow and the dim light filtering in through the dirty window, Ryan looked ghostly. "No," Spencer said. "We're just doing a systems check." He ran his thumb over the edge of the accelerator, said, "You can check it. If you want. If...you'd like to."  
  
Ryan came forward to stand at Spencer's elbow. "Standby for check," Spencer said into his headset and watched out of the corner of his eye as Ryan punched through the navigation system with one hand. He'd been wearing the sling all week. A few button caps had come off, leaving the levers exposed, but Ryan just pressed his thumb down over them. He was wearing gloves, a thick scarf, and a hat. Spencer didn't know if the hat covered up something that he hadn't seen or if it was just for the sake of continuity. More likely, Ryan thought it was stylish. Spencer smiled a little then winced as his lips cracked. The fact that Ryan had covered up meant that Brent didn't know, but Spencer couldn't see how they'd keep it from him for long. Spencer had no idea how the resistance felt about organic cybernetics, but the Alliance's views were crystal-clear.  
  
Ryan ran a quick diagnostic then stepped back. "Looks good to me," he reported, turning to look down at Spencer in his chair. Spencer was sitting and Ryan towered over him, his face mostly in shadow where the brim of the hat cut off the light from outside. He stood there a moment, looking down at Spencer, and Spencer's heart thumped fast before Ryan turned and walked back out of the cockpit.  
  
"Check complete," Spencer said and watched the lights of the navigation system die. It'd been a week. They hadn't said anything about that day in the bathroom -- or rather, Ryan hadn't said anything and Spencer didn't know what to say. He figured if Ryan wanted to talk about it, he would, and then Spencer would know how that conversation was meant to go. Or what Ryan actually wanted him to know. The only cyborg that Spencer had ever seen before had been a prisoner on Buckton. He'd gone down to the medic bay to get a renewal of A-NINE and had been right there as they wheeled the hover-stretcher out. The prisoner had been discovered to have a cybernetic arm and shoulder and two ribs; they were taking it -- _it_ \-- down to the Special Units branch to have it dismantled. Curious in a morbid way, Spencer had craned his neck and for just one moment he'd seen a pair of wide green eyes looking back at him. It'd been a girl, hardly more than thirteen.   
  
"Whaddya wanna do next?" Brent's voice crackled in the headset's earpiece.  
  
They finished up just as the first sunset turned the whole sky a burnt orange. Spencer lingered in the ship's darkness as long as he could; he'd be more than happy if he never saw colors like this again. As he clambered down the narrow ladder into the hold -- it almost came away from the wall under his weight, fuck, he'd have to bolt it back in before he let anyone else climb on it -- he looked ahead toward the rear loading dock and saw Ryan sitting with his back to one side of the hatchway, just above where the ramp sloped down towards the ground below. He was turned away from Spencer, looking out at the hulks of broken ships. His knees were drawn up to different levels so that his skinny legs cut intersecting silhouettes against the garish light.  
  
Spencer imagined hooking his hands under both of Ryan's knees and pulling them wide, settling between them. Running his fingers up under Ryan's long-sleeved sweaters and jackets to chase those peeks of skin that he'd only caught glimpses of during the week. He had no idea what else his hands would encounter if he did, but that didn't stop him from imagining it almost constantly.  
  
Brent clambered up from the engine room. Spencer told him, "The ship diagnostic is screwed up, it won't do a full surface check."  
  
Brent nodded. "I was thinking I could seal it up and switch on the backup life support. It should last sixteen hours, so if it starts running low before then..."  
  
"Then we know we've got a leak. Good plan." Spencer looked back out the hatch, squinting at the surrounding vessels. "Find a battery from one of those, though. Don't waste the one we've got."  
  
There was a pause and then Brent muttered, "Yes, sir."  
  
Spencer blinked then looked at him sharply. Brent's mouth was set in a down-turned bow. He'd been a sulker when they were younger, prone to pouting and giving the silent treatment. Setting his own jaw, Spencer wiped dust off his hands onto his trousers -- still Alliance-issue, he really fucking needed to find some new ones but Ryan's were all way too small now -- and started towards the hatch.  
  
He'd only gone a few steps, though, before Brent said, "Hey." When Spencer turned back the mulish expression had dropped off Brent's face. He shifted in place, rubbing a greasy hand over his forehead, and shrugged awkwardly. "It's all right, man."  
  
Spencer wasn't sure whether to take that as an apology, or as an acceptance of his own assumed remorse. He nodded shortly. Brent shrugged again then glanced past him. "You guys heading out?"  
  
Ryan had stood up and was carefully dusting off his skinny trousers. "Guess so," Spencer said. "We'll be back -- are you doing the hull test tomorrow?"  
  
"Tonight, probably." Brent paused then added in a low voice, "It looked like this, on Nuevo. At the end."  
  
When Spencer looked again, Brent didn't seem that young anymore. Ryan stood straight and narrow in the hatchway, looking in at them with his back to the light. Spencer couldn't see his face. The three of them stood inside the cargo hold as the wind whistled outside and the light shifted to red.   
  
  
\--   
  
  
After basic they'd been split up to go to advanced training. Spencer had stayed on at Buckton, going to the flight school there; Trevor had been shipped out to Lokariot for Intelligence. Everyone had gone someplace different. The Alliance had a lot of territory, and it needed soldiers everywhere.  
  
It'd been methodical, but slow enough that Spencer hadn't even realized what had happened until he did a fighter takeoff for the first time. He had a dicey moment coming out of the launch tube, when for the first time it had just been him, his ship, and empty space. It was common enough to freeze in a first launch that their flight instructors called it the Cobra Clench, after the callsign of a cadet who'd frozen up and almost crashed into the side of the freighter.  
  
Spencer hadn't frozen up exactly, just hesitated, staring out the visor at the void. The tinny voice of his flight instructor had immediately blurted from his comm speaker: "Smith -- Smith, you going snakey on us?"  
  
She was waiting, Spencer had realized, she was waiting for him to fuck up. Back in basic the Nuevo Montenegro crew had watched each other's backs; but these people weren't his friends. There was no one left on this station who he could call his own. He'd swallowed, cleared his throat, and pressed the comm button. "Launch protocol is radio silence, please maintain radio silence."  
  
She'd made no reply after that and Spencer had flown on alone in the dark.  
  
His flight instructor's name was Asher. The night before his graduation, he'd fucked her in the pilot quarters with their one-piece flight uniforms still slumping off their bodies, her back pressed against her locker and her legs wrapped around his waist. They hadn't talked or even kissed. She'd held onto his shoulders, though, and let him fuck her until they were both panting, grunting, making loud desperate noises. When she came she'd gasped out someone's name; Spencer had pushed his face into her collarbone and thought of Trevor, of Ryan.  
  
Afterward she'd avoided his gaze shyly, tucking her hair back and zipping up her uniform with shaky fingers. She hadn't been much older than him. "Good luck out there," she'd murmured and Spencer had smiled emptily.  
  
The next day he'd shipped out on his first assignment.

\--

Once the first sun had set they entered into a kind of secondary day, lit only by the smaller sun. Spencer and Ryan walked back to their temporary home in a fuzzy half-light that softened the edges of everything. The power had already gone out in half the city; in the absence of air units or automated street cars ferrying their empty doors from place to place, the streets were eerily still. Spencer imagined he could feel the air itself slowing down, hanging heavy without the terraforming units to convert their exhales.   
  
His shoulder bumped into Ryan's. They'd drawn closer to each other as they walked. Spencer thought about moving away, but Ryan would if he wanted to. "Brent said this reminded him of home," he murmured, just to break the silence with more than their footfalls. "Like...when it happened."  
  
Ryan made a faint noise. "He hardly ever talks about it. His family made it to Centauri V okay, but I think he took it pretty hard. He liked Nuevo."  
  
"I went back once, afterward." Spencer pushed his hands in his pockets, curling them up tight to warm the tips. "We were going somewhere nearby and there was a refueling station in orbit around one of the moons, so we stopped there. I volunteered for a patrol, so I could go out and see it." That'd been a dumb thing to do and there had been a few questions from his superiors afterward, but Spencer had shrugged the whole thing off as idle curiosity and ignored the burn in his stomach.  
  
Out of the corner of his eye he could feel Ryan staring at him. Belatedly Spencer realized that they had yet to talk about his service except in the most abstract. "What'd it look like?" Ryan asked finally.  
  
Spencer shrugged, pushing his hands deeper in his pockets. He remembered staring down at the planet's still surface and thinking that there must be no sound, anywhere. There wasn't, of course, sound waves couldn't travel in a vacuum, and Nuevo Montenegro had quickly shrugged off its clinging atmosphere; but the silence in Spencer's mind had nothing to do with ear drums. "Empty. The clouds had all evaporated. There were still cities, but no lights in them. It just looked like a rock in space."  
  
"It's weird," Ryan said, "I never liked Nuevo, but now I miss it. Or...I guess I miss that it's not out there, somewhere. It was still home. We were _born_ there, it was our home planet, and now it's gone forever." He rubbed his fingers around the wrist of his injured arm. "We sent people to report and others to help out the refugees, but I wish I could have been there."  
  
Spencer nodded, even though Ryan wasn't looking in his direction. They walked a little further.  
  
Ryan said softly, "You don't know how much you care about something until you lose it."  
  
Their feet slowed to a stop, together. Ryan slanted a look at him from underneath the hat brim. The scarf around his neck had come loose, exposing the pink hollow of his throat. On either side, tiny slivers of metal peeked over the embroidered collar of his jacket.  
  
"Ryan," Spencer said. Ryan was looking at him, straight at him, his gaze open and frank. Spencer licked his bottom lip, flinching at the rawness there. "What happened to you? What made you..." His hands were still buried in his pockets, so he let his eyes briefly drop to the tiny bit of uncovered cybernetics.  
  
Something happened behind Ryan's eyes, just the briefest flash of something that might be pain or might be an automatic neuron firing off a message to reply with a prerecorded response. He turned away, first looking down the street then moving in that direction.  
  
"Ryan," Spencer repeated, and Ryan turned sharply on his heel.  
  
"It was a bomb," he said flatly, his voice devoid of any emotion. "I set a bomb wrong and it went off too soon."  
  
"A bomb," Spencer repeated. He'd guessed that already: the cybernetics were so pervasive, it had to have been something high-impact.  
  
"When I first joined I was part of a sleeper cell. We were sent to live places, and we wouldn't know why. Then someone would show up or send us a message, and we'd move. Usually it was kind of obvious -- like, there'd be a weapons contractor or Alliance base on that moon or something. But we still had to wait, sometimes for weeks."  
  
The air's stillness had permeated Ryan, made him closed off and distant. Looking at him right now, Spencer could believe all the things they'd been taught about how cyborgs had lost their ability to experience emotions. _Machines don't dream_. He felt cold. "You bombed bases?"  
  
"Yes. The last one was on Equoin."  
  
This was not a conversation to have out in the open. They should be getting inside. They shouldn't be having this conversation _at all_ \-- because of course Ryan had bombed bases and Spencer had maybe killed a few of his rebel pals, and there was no way for this to end well -- except Spencer needed to _know_ , he had to know what Ryan felt anymore, if he _could_ feel. So he said, "I heard about that. A whole class of hydration engineering cadets died in the fire. Was hydration a high-level target, or were you guys just feeling ironic?"  
  
Ryan's mouth twisted. "It wasn't supposed to happen. We were trying to disable the base's power mainframe, no one was supposed to die."  
  
"You set bombs, people die, Ryan, and not all of them will be who you mean to kill. I knew people on that base, from Buckton, from _home_. Did you think -- " He cut off. He'd been going to say _did you ever think that you might kill_ me, but that was an incredibly dumb thing to ask. No matter what the answer, it wouldn't be something he could stand to hear.  
  
"What about you?" Ryan spat out. "Do you know the names of every person _you've_ ever killed?" It was Spencer's turn to take a step back; Ryan didn't wait for him to answer. "They were developing a chemical weapon at Equoin, something that could go into a planet's water supply. Kill billions of people at once. Did you ever hear about that part?"  
  
Spencer made himself take a few deep breaths. "No. Did they -- ever use it?"  
  
Ryan gestured sharply with his good hand, flinging it palm-upward at the sky then letting it slap against his leg. "I...don't know. Sometimes things happen and we can't get there fast enough. Sometimes a planet dies and there's no one around to hear it. I never saw it mentioned again on the datastream."  
  
The second sun had dropped low on the horizon. It wouldn't be long before they couldn't find their way home at all. "Maybe you stopped it," Spencer said.  
  
"Right," Ryan said bitterly, dropping his gaze to the ground. "Sure I did."  
  
Spencer didn't really believe it either. "What happened after you -- "  
  
"Why?" The material of Ryan's glove creaked as he curled his hand into a fist at his side, but his face had gone frighteningly blank again.  
  
"Why what?"  
  
"Why do you want to know? Are you scared that I've given up my human soul? That I'm cold and dead inside?"  
  
 _Yes_. "What -- "  
  
"I don't know," Ryan said. "I don't know. I didn't fucking choose this, okay, I would have been -- I could have died, I would have chosen that, but they didn't let me. The bomb went off and I thought, 'This is it,' and no one was there to save me. The others were all in position and I was alone. Then I woke up and they'd already...they kept telling me, they kept saying this was a new life but I'm just -- fucking _wires_ and shit. I can feel every single fucking place that isn't _me_ anymore, and _I hate it_. I didn't want to be a _thing_ , I didn't, I didn't." His voice had risen to a shout. He wasn't crying, not physically; his eyes were completely dry. Maybe he couldn't cry anymore.   
  
A gust of wind blew sharply down the street, picking up bits of garbage in a swirl and dislodging Ryan's hat. He caught it quickly and closed his eyes against the breeze.  
  
"Fuck," Spencer said. "Run."  
  
By the time they got back to the apartment it was almost pitch black outside and the wind had picked up. Somewhere a hole was widening in the atmosphere and all the air was heading in that direction, and the storms would only get worse. It wouldn't be long now.  
  
They careened into the building, the door slamming shut behind them then opening and slamming again in the wind before Spencer caught it and heaved it closed all the way. "Fuck," Ryan swore, panting. He was pale. His fingers moved against the wall, digging his fingers into the plaster uselessly. His next breath whistled.  
  
"You okay?"  
  
"Yeah. Sure."  
  
By the time they marched up the stairs to Ryan's apartment the whole building was creaking in the storm's force and Ryan was sucking in thin breaths. He walked with his shoulders hunched in. The hairs on Spencer's neck prickled. "Ryan..."  
  
"I'm fucking...fine!" Ryan yelled. His voice cracked along the hollow places of the deserted building around them, and he had to take a breath halfway through. "Just...leave me the fuck...alone, okay? You..." He lurched off down the hallway, a thin shadow in the dark. "You can't help. No one...fucking help." Light flashed into the hall as he shouldered open the door to the apartment and disappeared inside.  
  
Spencer stood in the hall. The wind howled. He couldn't go back out tonight. Maybe he could stay in one of the other rooms -- but Ryan hadn't shut the door behind him. It was leaking light and warmth outward and Spencer followed almost blindly.  
  
Ryan wasn't in the kitchen or the bathroom. The rubbish bin at the end of the hallway lay overturned again; Ryan had never been particularly graceful but now he zig-zagged even at short distances. Spencer could hear him moving around in his room. He wavered in the open doorway, but Ryan hadn't actually -- Spencer still had to fly them out of here, Ryan and Brent needed him. They needed him. They all needed to get out of here. Afterward, Spencer would deal with afterward, but right now he had to focus on getting off this planet. He crossed to the kitchen counter and began pulling out whatever meager food rations and contraband supplies they had. Taking a semi-clean cloth, he put all the food in its center. All they had to do was fold up the sides and sling it over his shoulder. He should really have done this days ago. If an Alliance patrol sighted them they'd have split seconds to make a run for it, but at this stage leaving their food behind would mean starvation. The refugees had probably taken everything with them that they could carry, and whatever had been left behind probably wouldn't last without refrigeration. Spencer made a mental note to check out the surrounding apartments for any other nonperishable foods and headed for the bathroom.  
  
There was less to do in there. Ryan traveled light -- or maybe he didn't need toiletries anymore. Spencer had seen him eat, so presumably he still had a digestive system, but who knew about sweat glands or things like that? Spencer rubbed at his forehead, giggling a little at the absurdity of his thoughts, then picked up the med kit and did a quick inventory. They needed bandages and saline and a few other things; they were almost entirely out of muscle relaxants. There was an empty cartridge still in the med dispenser so that must be what Ryan was dosing himself with. A memory flashed in Spencer mind: Ryan sitting in the bathroom with his hand twitching convulsively in his lap.  
  
Spencer carried the med kit into the kitchen. Best to consolidate all their supplies. He nudged at the wiring that littered the floor then knelt down to start sorting through what could be saved and what was so frayed by Ryan's demented idea of equipment maintenance as to be useless. They'd have to leave most of it behind. He packed up Ryan's data port and folding-screen tablet, putting them back in their case. The most recent version of the rebels' stream would still be saved on its local drive, but without the IC dish it was useless as a comms unit.  
  
Down the hall, Ryan's movements had stilled. Spencer gnawed at his lip then eased the case down to the floor as carefully as possible. Everything in him wanted to keep working, but Ryan needed to sleep. He sat down on the edge of his makeshift bed, looking around him. There was still so much to do. His legs trembled where he'd crossed them at the knee, though, a sure sign that he'd overworked the muscles again. If he didn't rest for a while they'd give out completely.  
  
The data port case sat beside his bed. Spencer tapped at its battered edge. His mind kept going back over everything that Ryan had said, about Equoin and the weapon the Alliance had been developing there.  
  
Opening the case again, he pulled the tablet out and switched it on.  
  
It took some digging to find the right entry, and even then it was scattered and difficult to parse. Maybe that was because Ryan's accident had thrown them into disarray, or maybe the resistance just hadn't wanted to admit they'd killed an entire class full of maintenance cadets, none of whom had been above the age of twenty. Either way, the most Spencer could figure out was that there had been a weapons development lab on Equoin, and they'd been about to test out their newest biological agent; whatever losses had been sustained on either side were probably considered acceptable.  
  
None of the reports mentioned Ryan, but someone, somewhere, had obviously cared about him. Even if it wasn't what he'd wanted...he would have died otherwise; if Spencer had been there on Equoin, he probably would have done the same thing. Maybe Ryan would have hated him forever for it, but at least he would have been alive. He was still alive. That was enough.  
  
Spencer reached the end of the report. For a long moment he sat listening to the wind outside, staring at the words until they blurred. Then he did a search for _Ypsilon-X5H_.  
  
It was a lot more recent, and a few results popped up immediately.  
  


> _The few survivors left are almost universally deformed. Whatever monstrosity the Alliance inflicted on Ypsilon, it ate these people alive. They're missing hands, toes, eyes, noses, ears; some can't even eat, their tongues and chewing muscles having been utterly decimated. The lucky ones maintain some motor functions, but the soft tissue of of facial features seems especially susceptible. They bear the appearance of having melted like so many human candles..._

  
Spencer closed that one and touched the next report on the list. It was written by a medic, short and terse.  
  


> _Our best bet is the Larousse virus. The vics described it as being eaten but it's more like being dissolved bit by bit. Incredibly fucking painful way to go. Some of them have responded to meds but there aren't enough to go around. We're treating the ones who stand the best chance of survival. The ones who don't we've put in isolation. At least three have personally asked me for euthanasia..._

  
The third report on the list -- the long list -- was a first-hand account.  
  


>   
>  _It spread everywhere so fucking fast. All somebody had to do was touch you. I've lost the last knuckle of all of my fingers, most of my toes, the skin on my back, and I was lucky. It ate the skin first and the blood got everywhere and that could transmit, too. It was on the walls, on the floor, in the streets, in the water. Everything was red._
> 
> _Quarantine didn't work. I saw one guy, a doctor, try to hack off his hand where a patient had grabbed him, and then the other doctors, his own fucking_ friends _just shoved him into quarantine with the others. People turned into fucking animals. They shot each other on sight. They stole medicine. They threw infected people into fires while they were still alive then it turned out that the virus could turn airborne and all that ash got in their lungs and ate them from the inside. They deserved it. The fucking Alliance dropped that thing on us but what happened down here was worse. We all deserve to burn._
> 
> _The worst fucking thing is that none of us know_ why _. Did they just want to test it out? There wasn't any resistance here before the attack. Now everyone wants to fight, even the ones who can't. It's all bullshit. People talk about getting revenge, but I think we all just want to die. Some of us already look like skeletons, no noses or mouths or faces. They took away our fucking faces and nothing can ever --_  
> 

  
  
Spencer unplugged the tablet screen and switched the data port off.  
  
There were seven A-NINE cartridges left in the pocket he'd sewn into the hem of his pant leg. He slipped one out and pushed it into the dispenser; the needle flick didn't even hurt anymore, he'd gotten used to it ages ago. The empty cartridge clinked then rolled across the floor when he tossed it aside, then he crawled into his makeshift bed on the floor and lay staring at the wall.   
  
His ears buzzed. Shudders trickled up his spine. He strained with the effort not to think. The kitchen light flickered and the building creaked. He'd forgotten to turn it off. It'd be so easy for someone to find them -- all they had to do was come up the stairs to the fourth floor and see the light. It didn't even need to be the Alliance, there were plenty of scavengers who swooped down to pick the bones of dying planets. Ryan was an idiot for leaving the light on at all. If he stayed he'd have to tell Ryan -- or maybe Ryan already knew. Spencer mentally stumbled back through the last few days, how Ryan had looked at him and talked to him. The way Ryan had told him that he couldn't help. Spencer sat up again. His shoulders screamed with tension after hunching over the comms unit for so long. The kitchen light stabbed into his dry eyes. Ryan knew what he'd done.  
  
He'd leave right now, except Ryan still needed a pilot. In two days, Spencer would fly them out of the atmosphere, jump to the nearest station, and then he'd -- he'd pretend to have had a change of heart and he was going back to the Alliance...no, Ryan would never believe that he was that stupid. He could pretend to be horrified by what Ryan had become. That sounded a bit more plausible and was even halfway true. After everything else he'd done -- he cupped hands over his eyes, fingernails digging into his skin, and bent forward to put his head between his knees. No. He couldn't hurt Ryan that way. Maybe Ryan wouldn't even need an excuse, maybe he'd be relieved to see Spencer go. Probably. Ryan _must_ know what he'd done, it was his job to know stuff like this. Fuck. Fuck.  
  
Spencer lay back down. That was why he'd -- he was right to say Spencer couldn't help him. It felt like something huge was pressing him through the floor and he lay still underneath it, his hands in fists and his breath fast. He'd get Ryan somewhere safe and then Spencer would -- he'd -- he'd -- no no, he'd spent so long trying so hard to stay alive. He wasn't brave enough to stop now. There weren't a whole lot of places he could go, though: any part of the universe that didn't belong to the Alliance would be crawling with rebels, and both sides would love to put a bullet in his head. There was no good option. His mind raced. Maybe he'd buy his way onto a scavenger ship -- though he couldn't think of anything he had that they'd take as a buy-in...his internal organs if he was lucky, his ass if he wasn't. He'd need to keep moving. Or maybe ship out with some miner's outfit to a remote star system. Sometimes the Alliance set aside mineral-rich planets for non-settlement then cut deals with private companies for access to their deposits. The miners went underground, solo, for years at a time without any contact except their supply depots. Getting a steady line of A-NINE would be tricky but other than that it'd be a perfect place to hide out. Totally isolated, nothing on the planet except him and the mining machines.  
  
He folded his arms tight across his chest, rubbing one thumb against his breastbone along the way, and pulled his knees up against the outside of his arms. He'd been pushing himself too hard and every muscle in his body ached, yet at the same time he felt strangely numb. It was like watching a firefight from a disabled ship, helpless and surrounded by a blackness that wanted to suck the life out of him. The only sound was the wind outside and his teeth chattering together. He couldn't stop shaking. He thought suddenly, clearly, _Don't you ever forgive this. Don't you ever let yourself forgive this._   
  
He didn't know how long he lay curled up like that. Probably a while until, in Ryan's room, something thudded loudly on the floor. Then a series of thumps. Spencer rolled over and sat up, gasping in pain; the muscles in his legs and back had clenched up so hard he could barely move.  
  
Footsteps came down the hall and Ryan staggered into the kitchen.  
  
"Ryan!" Spencer scrambled up and dove across the kitchen just as Ryan's legs folded up on themselves. He tipped sideways, eyes rolling unsteadily and his left arm groping out to break his fall; Spencer broke it instead, catching him around the waist. They slumped downward together at a slower rate.  
  
"Ryan," Spencer said, "Ryan, what's wrong?"  
  
Ryan's mouth worked like a fish, opening and closing. His fingers dug into Spencer's shoulders. He sucked in one awful breath, the tiniest strangled gasp.  
  
"Fuck." Spencer settled Ryan on the floor and leaned over him. "Is there -- did you swallow something?" Ryan pulled a face and shook his head. He dropped one hand to the front of his chest, gripping his own shirt. "Your lungs?" Spencer asked, reaching down to cover Ryan's hand with his own.  
  
Then he went still. The muscles of Ryan's abdomen were rigid. Underneath his palm, Ryan pushed down, compressing his own chest a hair; air whistled out of his mouth and he gasped out, "Can't." The moment he let up, his ribcage expanded outward again and his face twisted up helplessly.  
  
"You can't breathe out?" Spencer guessed. He straightened, putting the heels of both hands over on the apex of Ryan's diaphragm and pushing down.  
  
Relief washed over Ryan's face as he exhaled. He spoke in a rush. "I don't know what's wrong I just keep breathing in and." He cut off as Spencer had to let up, and Ryan breathed in. Too fast, too much, and he got stuck right on the apex of the inhale. His hands flailed out to grab Spencer's forearms; Spencer pushed down again. Words tumbled out of Ryan, scared and small. "I don't know how to fix it, I keep trying but it just." He shook his head even as his body inhaled.  
  
"What do I do?"  
  
"I don't know," Ryan breathed out then repeated it soundlessly, mouthing the words at Spencer. The edges of his wide, pleading eyes were damp and a tear trickled down over his temple. He could cry, after all.  
  
Spencer's skin prickled cold. He pushed down on Ryan's diaphragm again, working his lungs like bellows. A ventilator would do this but there was nowhere, no one -- just Spencer. He took a deep breath of his own. "All right. Don't try to talk, just focus on breathing. Gimme -- gimme just second."  
  
Ryan's hands tightened on his forearms, squeezing him silently. Or at least the left hand did. The right one kept gripping then letting go. Spencer glanced at it just as he bore down, in time to see the hand flex back around his wrist. The moment he let up, though, the fingers began spasming just like they had in the bathroom a week ago.  
  
"That's," Spencer said slowly, watching the hand. "Ryan, how did you hurt yourself again? You said you hurt your shoulder."  
  
"I," Ryan choked out on the next exhale, "I fell on the stairs and my shoulder dis -- " He breathed in.  
  
"Did this start at the same time?"  
  
Ryan didn't wait for an exhale, just nodded frantically.  
  
"Shit. Okay, hold on." Sitting back, Spencer caught Ryan by both arms and turned him over, running a hand over his back. "I'm gonna -- this is related, it has to be -- I'm gonna put your shoulder back in, okay? Okay, just -- hold on, Ryan, I got this. Just relax." A hard lump marked the place where the bone had come out of alignment, and Spencer guided Ryan's elbow back and back and back before he pushed down, hard.   
  
Ryan made a thin noise of agony and thrashed beneath him. Something ground together under Spencer's palm; it wasn't bone. Spencer gritted his teeth and shifted his weight against Ryan's back, trying to hold him still. "Fucking stop, Ryan -- _stop_ , I have to do this!"  
  
He couldn't. The muscles in Ryan's shoulder kept seizing up. Spencer could feel them clenching underneath Ryan's skin...except they might not be actual _muscles_ anymore. Spencer shifted back and yanked at Ryan's shirt. It was an old-fashioned button down with a high collar; Spencer grabbed onto the collar with both hands and ripped it open. Underneath, Ryan's shoulder was smooth and featureless except for where the dislocated bone stood out from the back of his clavicle. Real skin would have split open; this was all artificial. Spencer could see the point just below Ryan's shoulder blade where it faded into scars and freckles, the tiny imperfections of reality.  
  
Tiny guttural noises choked out of Ryan's mouth where it was squished against the floor. His right hand spasmed like a living thing -- but wasn't, either. When Spencer reached out to grab it he felt metal in half of Ryan's fingertips, on the back of his palm, his wrist. The muscles there were jumping, too, and when Spencer put his other hand on Ryan's shoulder then wormed it under his body to his stomach, he realized that all three places were seizing at the same erratic rhythm.  
  
"Okay. Okay." Spencer let go of Ryan's hand and combed his fingers back through his hair before hovering his palms over Ryan's shoulder, as though he could discern a solution through half-touch alone. Something had to be sending electrical charges to that particular set of muscles, like the touchpad of a ship's directional system. Which meant there had to be a controller of sorts, something that would send out the signals then collect feedback.  
  
"Ryan," Spencer said, pushing him onto his back and leaning down to bring their faces close. Ryan's eyes were closed. Terror shot through Spencer and he grabbed Ryan's face with both hands, shaking him roughly until Ryan's' eyelids snapped open. "Ryan," Spencer choked, "come on, you have to stay with me here. You have to help me out. There's a controller, right? For the -- for your parts. For the pieces that aren't you." Something flickered in Ryan's eyes, the same flash of hurt that Spencer had seen on the street. He gentled his grip, wrestling himself back from the edge of panic and ducking his head to meet Ryan's blurred gaze. "I need to know how this works. I can fix this, I promise, I just need to know where to start."  
  
Ryan's mouth worked emptily. The back of his other hand knocked into Spencer's jaw as he reached upward, his fingers jabbing towards his neck but Spencer saw nothing there except bare skin and the steel arc of Ryan's collarbone. When he ran his fingers all around Ryan's throat, though, they encountered something blunt and hard on the back. Turning him over again, he found a small metal square embedded in the base of Ryan's neck. "Okay, I got it," Spencer gasped. "I got this. That's the controller -- it's right near your brain and your spine, so it must control your whole -- but that's impossible, no way could it control _everything_ \-- fuck, okay, wait. It's a basic controller-transmitter-actuator system, except there have to be sensors for maintaining stasis, too, right?"  
  
Ryan just gasped thinly, and Spencer didn't wait for a reply. He was too busy tracing his fingers over the back of Ryan's shoulder, his mouth barely keeping pace with his thoughts. "So it's a feedback loop. The system's getting feedback -- no oxygen, so it keeps trying -- and that just makes it _worse_ , because you can't get that bone back. It must be pinching a transmission fiber and that's fucking up the actuators. So I _do_ have to get that bone back in, but I _can't_ until I get the fucking controller to stop telling the actuators around it to -- "  
  
He cut off for a moment then swallowed and reached up to touch the side of Ryan's face where it lay flat on the ground. "Okay. Okay. Just hold on. I know what to do."  
  
Leaving Ryan curled up on the floor, Spencer scrambled to his feet and turned a full circle in the kitchen, his eyes racing over anything that he could use. There wasn't much. The shelves were empty of appliances. The low-frequency two-way radio that Ryan used to communicate with Brent would have too much voltage. So would the data port -- except the tablet, "The tablet's detachable, it must have a battery," and his knees cracked against the floor as he yanked the little tablet out of the data port case. It flickered on automatically then sputtered as Spencer smashed the plastic frame against the ground.  
  
The tablet's guts spilled out easily when he gave them a good yank. Spencer spun his fingers through the cords, grabbing for the largest one, the retractable wire that connected to the data port. Spencer scrambled back up -- wincing at the pain in his knees -- to grab a knife from the kitchen; he used it to cut away the rubber casing. He couldn't cut the actual wire by hand, though, not without shocking himself.  
  
Something cold closed around his ankle. Ryan lay on his side with his arm outflung; his fingers dug into Spencer's skin. "I'm here," Spencer murmured, reaching back to touch Ryan's skinny elbow. "I'm not going anywhere, just keep holding on." He opened the case wide, set the bare wire on the edge of the bottom lid, and brought the top lid down as hard as he could. It didn't cut the wire all the way, but it probably got far enough to expose the current.  
  
Now he just had to ground it. Ryan watched him through slitted eyes as Spencer crawled back one-handed, the wire held carefully aloft. He was barely breathing, sprawled helpless on the dirty floor. Spencer patted his face awkwardly and tried to smile. "Okay. This is gonna hurt, and I'm sorry. I have disrupt the feedback loop, so I'm gonna introduce a different electrical charge."  
  
Ryan blinked once, but if that was meant as permission or protest, Spencer couldn't tell. He pushed Ryan facedown again, shoulders flat against the floor, his shirt pulled down to expose the back of his neck.  
  
"Okay," Spencer whispered. He crouched over Ryan, careful not to touch him anywhere, and gripped cord by its rubber casing. "Okay."  
  
He brought the frayed end down to touch the metal square in Ryan's neck.  
  
It sparked on contact. Ryan croaked loudly, his legs kicking and his face twisting up in pain, and Spencer brought his knee down hard right onto the dislocated bone.  
  
It popped, loudly, and air rushed out of Ryan's mouth in one massive exhale.  
  
" _Yes_." Spencer stretched to put the wire out of the reach of Ryan's twitching limbs then quickly scooped him up and turned him over. When he put a hand back on his abdomen he could feel Ryan's diaphragm hitching. So it was moving, even if it had fallen out of rhythm and didn't know how to get the respiration cycle kickstarted again. Which should be better, it should be fine except for a nasty case of hiccups, "Oh, thank fuck, that's -- Ry?"  
  
Ryan's eyes were rolling in his head. "Stop -- Ryan, you can breathe, just come on and breathe -- " Spencer shook Ryan gently, cupping one palm against the side of his throat. "Fucking breathe, what, why -- come on, Ry, breathe, _please_."  
  
Ryan didn't reply. He was convulsing very slightly, a tremor in his limbs. It didn't make sense: the electrical charge shouldn't have been enough to short out any systems, just to disrupt the feedback loop. Maybe the transmission fibers had been irreparably damaged -- no, no, _fuck_ , he could fix this. Spencer mentally raced over his other options. The only other way to disrupt a feedback loop was to shut down and reboot, but...this wasn't a machine. There wasn't a fucking _off_ switch or a manual fucking override, this was _Ryan_ , whose lips were turning blue. It made Spencer think of a cadet at flight school whose fighter had been damaged in landing. The air had all rushed out and she'd been blue when they pulled her out, blue and shaking --  
  
"Shit, shit, wait." Spencer sat back, his mind switching tracks. Pilots were always given epinephrine shots, it opened up air passageways and bronchials that had shut down in response to accidental exposure to a vacuum. That cadet, the medics had stuck a needle in her chest and slapped a ventilator over her mouth and she'd lurched back to life right on the launch bay floor.  
  
Electric shock could do something similar. Like the electric shock that Spencer had just given him.  
  
"Shit, hold on, I can fix this, I can, I can." Spencer scrabbled across the floor, diving for the med kit, babbling to Ryan as he heaved open the small square case and pawed through its contents. He had no way of knowing whether Ryan's lungs would respond the same way, but Ryan had injected himself with muscle relaxants. So was at least still partway human. Maybe, maybe, his lungs were real, or real enough to respond the same way. It was a stupid gamble but he didn't know what else to do. "Just please hold on, don't leave me now. Not now, Ry, please, I can -- that cadet, she came right back. I'm here, I can fix this, I promise, please."  
  
There wasn't any epinephrine in the med kit. Spencer upended the whole thing onto the floor and stared desperately, but there wasn't a single cartridge. The refugees must have taken it with them, thinking that they might need it in space travel. Spencer gripped the edge of the empty kit for a frozen moment then flung it away from him. Small containers of useless painkillers and suture needles tumbled out across the floor as he kicked at them. One of his hands was bleeding; he didn't know why. He heard himself saying, "Please, please," his voice high and cracked and helpless, but the sound seemed far away. Ryan lay still on the floor.  
  
Spencer could barely see. He couldn't think. He could barely move. His own muscles were giving out -- he hadn't rested enough, he didn't even know what rest meant anymore. There was nothing he could do. He lifted his hands to his face. Something cold touched his cheek and for one incoherent moment he thought that somehow he had metal on his own hands. Then he squinted at his palm and saw the small, empty A-NINE cartridge stuck to his skin, the one he'd dosed himself with earlier. A-NINE -- A for adrenaline. It was only part of the cocktail, a small part, but his hands were already clawing at his pant leg.  
  
The cloth ripped and little cylindrical cartridges scattered everywhere, rolling across the floor. He had to chase them, crawling. The med dispenser was wedged against the wall and he fumbled with it, shaking so hard he could barely get the cartridge in the slot; the first time he tried the cartridge popped right back out again and went spinning against the wall, where it shattered. He had to scramble for another one then cradle the dispenser to his chest and steady his hands as he pushed it in. He was still saying, "Please," whispering it now.  
  
Ryan had stopped shaking. He wasn't moving at all when Spencer pushed the med dispenser against his chest and he didn't move when Spencer pushed the plunger in and he didn't move afterwards.  
  
Spencer crawled across the floor for another cartridge.  
  
This time Ryan twitched, once, and a little choked noise hiccuped out of his throat. Spencer froze then rushed to pop out the empty cartridge, shove in a new one. The plunger went down and Ryan sucked in an uneven breath. His eyelids fluttered. "Come on," Spencer murmured, watching his face.  
  
Ryan took another breath, but it stuttered in his throat. His chest jumped unevenly. His diaphragm still hadn't resumed regular contractions. Spencer swallowed, putting the med dispenser down but keeping it close. He put his knee on Ryan's abdomen again and pushed down slowly, steadily, compressing Ryan's lungs. Breath whistled out of Ryan's mouth and Spencer let up, picked up the med dispenser, popped in a new cartridge, and pushed it into Ryan's skin.  
  
Ryan breathed in on his own.  
  
Out.  
  
In. Out.  
  
One of the A-NINE cartridges rolled slowly across the uneven floor. A few others had cracked where they fell. All around them, the room was a chaotic mess of scattered medical supplies, wires, and broken things while outside, the storm howled on. Spencer bent over Ryan on his knees and took long even breathes as though he could force Ryan to do the same. Slowly, slowly the color flushed back into Ryan's skin and his inhales lengthened until he matched Spencer, until they were totally in sync, breathing together. Spencer rested his hand on Ryan's chest just to feel it rise and fall.  
  
Ryan's eyelids fluttered open. His eyes were glassy and dark. Spencer's vision swam. He could feel his face crumpling up. "It's okay, it's okay." He bent down to kiss the corner of Ryan's mouth, his cheek, his jaw, careful not to block his flow of oxygen or put any pressure on his chest. Spots of dampness fell off his own face onto Ryan's. Spencer wiped them carefully with his sleeve. "Don't try t'talk, just keep breathing. You're gonna b-be fine."  
  
His own chest hitched and burned. Spencer ignored it. Shuffling over to one side, he slid his arms under Ryan's knees and behind his back. He was heavier than Spencer expected; he staggered a bit, wincing at the strain on his joints, but then got his feet under him and headed down the darkened hall to Ryan's room. Ryan's head settled against his shoulder and Spencer tipped a cheekbone against the crown of his hair.  
  
"It's okay," he repeated as he eased Ryan down on the narrow cot. The bedroom was dark and still. He stretched up to kiss Ryan's mouth again and barely caught himself from falling down on top of him. The stretch-hammock sagged under their weight and Spencer braced himself on the frame, shaking with the strange angle, the adrenaline pounding through him, and the simple dumb exhaustion in every part of his body.  
  
The faint light shone in Ryan's eyes, still looking up. "I'll c-come with you," Spencer told him. He swallowed, struggling to sound calm and certain. "Right? You need me to come with you. It'll be okay, I can help. I'm good at this, remember? Promise I'll take care of you, Ryan, I will."  
  
A faint wheeze was his only answer, but it sounded like Ryan's lungs had reopened for business. Spencer sat back, wiped his face, and pulled the blankets up, tucking them carefully around Ryan then curling up at his side. He was hanging off the edge of the cot, one foot braced on the floor to keep from tumbling. _I can be good at this again_ , he thought fiercely and pressed his forehead against Ryan's shoulder.  
  
  
\--   
  
  


The bright lights at the award ceremony had made Spencer's head spin, rumbling surge of nausea in his belly, little dip into panic every time he looked straight at them and was blinded.

To keep from vomiting he'd counted every person in the room then categorized them by rank, re-categorized by actual influence and competence, then tried to figure out who else knew this was all a sham. What he'd really done. The commander had droned on about how Spencer had put his heavily-damaged CAP 158 into a barrel roll and slingshot it out of the planet's gravitational field, saving the lives of everyone on board, all the while taking heavy fire from insurgent forces.

Which was true. He'd done that. He had. He'd --

They called him lucky. It was a hard maneuver to pull of in a smaller fighter, let alone a transport ship filled with medical personnel. The weight ratios were insane. He should have blacked out, the ship should have come apart. His superiors had lined up to clap him on the back and had only looked at him with surprise when he'd said that there hadn't been any medical personnel, there hadn't been anyone on the ship at all except him and the navigator, a skinny kid named Alex. _Of course there were medical personnel, Smith, they were all listed by name on the manifest along with their supplies, you signed confirming that you'd taken them aboard, did you miss your last A-NINE shot or something?_

The manifest did say there were medical personnel on board, bound for Ypsilon-X5H. Spencer had never seen a single one of them, though, nor any of their supposed humanitarian supplies: he'd walked into his cargo hold to find rows and rows of unmarked drop-crates and a dozen blank-faced Special Units personnel, had quickly signed whatever anyone put in front of him, and had gone back to sit in the cockpit, shaking.

He didn't know what he'd done, not exactly. But there had been people on the planet before his mission and none afterward. He didn't know how many. He didn't know how or why. But he knew.

When the commander finished his speech, the whole room had burst into applause. No one else knew, or else they didn't care. He was alone. For one wild moment Spencer had considered grabbing a gun from the honor guard and opening up on them all, taking as many down with him as he could.

What he'd done, though, was stand at attention and pull the muscles of his face into a faint smile while they pinned the medal on his chest. He was never brave enough to do the things he should.

 

Sometime late the next day, Ryan finally crawled out of bed, came down the hall, and found Spencer sitting with his back against the front door, methodically grinding the cracked A-NINE cartridges underneath the heel of his boot. Spencer didn't look up and Ryan stood watching for a long moment before gingerly putting his back to the wall and sliding down to sit next to Spencer with his knees drawn up.

"I might go crazy," Spencer told him. He ground down with his boot, watching the glass crack. There were actually two left that Spencer hadn't spent on Ryan or broken the night before, but it wouldn't be enough to do Spencer any good. It'd be weeks before they'd be anywhere near a good black market station.

"Okay."

"I mean it. You're -- you only had a few doses, you'll be fine, but I've been on this shit for years. The odds aren't great."

"I know."

Of course he knew. Ryan had grown up listening to his father creak around the house at night, trapped on a drug that kept him alone in the dark while the rest of the world slept, and dreamed. Spencer closed his eyes. The sunlight still hurt; he was used to the artificial glow of ship interiors. "I started out as a fighter pilot, but I switched to long-range transport. I had to. Anyone who didn't got forcibly retired. They didn't want to take the chance of taking us off the A-NINE and having us go batshit aboard one of their ships."

"So they dumped a bunch of ticking time bombs on the civilian population," Ryan supplied bitterly.

"Basically, yeah." Spencer scrubbed a hand over his face. "Funny thing is, I coulda done that. Like, I coulda let them kick me out, I could have left a year ago, but I was scared. I didn't want to go crazy. So I re-upped for long-range transport and a lifetime supply of A-NINE. Figured I'd be less likely to see actual combat that way, too."

He tried to laugh -- it was funny, how stupid he'd been, how wrong -- but the sound came out as a dry rasp. Ryan said nothing. He probably knew all about that, too.

"Do you have a gun?" Spencer asked.

Ryan's fingers curled around his knees. "No. No."

"Ryan, I might get -- "

"No," Ryan spat.

Fuck, he should have left. "It's fucking called insanity, Ryan, I won't even fucking mean to but I could -- "

"I know what can fucking happen. Don't you think I know?" He shook his head frantically, his shoulders rigid. "I can't do that. Don't ask me to."

"Fuck, what, you planted bombs and you can't shoot one little person?" Spencer snapped his mouth shut like he could bite the words out of the air.

Ryan's eyes widened a little even as the skin around them relaxed. He didn't answer and the silence stretched out longer and longer like a piece of candy pulled out too far, slumping under the distance. The blackness behind Spencer's eyelids wasn't a comfort.

"As if I've got any room to talk," he said, filling in Ryan's part for him. "As if I've got a fucking millimeter." There was his opening to march out Ypsilon-X5H and all its friends, but he didn't know where to start. There were so many. He could feel himself coming loose again, drifting, shutting down in the face of them all. "I'm a bad person," he said blindly. That probably covered everything.

Ryan's knee landed against his side, pressing hard into Spencer's ribs. He cupped Spencer's jaw with one broken hand. "Spencer. You promised you were going to help me. I need your help. Okay?"

He tugged and cajoled until Spencer followed, letting himself be led back down the hall to Ryan's bedroom, letting Ryan push him down and curl a surprisingly heavy arm over Spencer's chest and hold him still against the mattress. "It'll be okay," Ryan murmured against his temple and Spencer shivered. Ryan was pressed all against his side. He tried to think of the last time someone had touched him this much -- probably his last ME, the doctors with their sterile gloves and blank eyes. It was hard to remember exactly when; he'd been living an endless day for the last four years.

 

\--

 

Apparently Spencer's famous luck hadn't worn out yet. He slept. It didn't come easily: even without the A-NINE his body needed rest, but his mind kept bolting upright from the edge of unfamiliar sleep. His mind was cluttered with things they'd need, provisions, plans, memories, dangers, a million things he could do if he just stayed awake a few more hours. But eventually, finally, improbably, he slept.

Then, the first dream he had was of someone breaking down the door and shooting them. It made him wonder how much of the reported sleep deprivation had been because of the A-NINE and how much had been the soldiers trying to keep themselves awake. He dreamed of blood that he'd never seen perched sky-high in his fighter; he dreamed of being sucked out an airlock into the empty vacuum; he dreamed that his sisters had been on Ypsilon-X5H -- it was strictly possible, they could have gone anywhere after Nuevo Montenegro had burned out -- and after he woke Ryan had to talk him down for hours.

Through the long hours of winding down, the nervous half-wakings, and the bolt-upright nightmares, Ryan stayed with him. The one time he crawled out was to raise Brent on the short-range radio to tell him no, they hadn't been captured by the Alliance or killed or blown up, but they were going to have push back the launch a couple of days; other than that, he lay pressed against Spencer's side. Their limbs bumped every time either one of them shifted and Spencer tried to be so careful with Ryan's body. He was still recovering, too, and the most Spencer moved over the next three days was to help him check his oxygen levels. Ryan sat on the mattress facing away from him, the neck of his shirt pulled down to expose the small square controller implanted in his skin at the top of his spine. "Can you see, right there -- there's a little hole."

Rubbing the grit out of his eyes, Spencer bent close. Most of Ryan's skin was pale except for the pink of scar tissue peeking around the edges of his shirt, but there was this one dark spot just to the left of the metal square that Spencer mistook for a freckle at first glance. When he touched that point in question, Ryan nodded. "Yeah, there. That's the output point. The sensor tip goes in there." Spencer couldn't see his face, but he sensed Ryan's eye-roll. "You have no idea how many jokes Pete made, okay, don't even."

Spencer looked at the tiny hole on the back of Ryan's neck then at the sensor tip in his other hand. "I don't think it's going to fit."

Ryan groaned, one hand rising to cover his face. "For fuck's sake, Spencer."

"No, I'm serious -- "

"So am I!"

"Okay, fine, shit." Spencer set the tip against the seriously fucking tiny freckle-hole and pushed it in. Immediately Ryan's whole body spasmed once, hard. Spencer froze. "Ry?"

"It's okay," Ryan said steadily. "It's -- that's the access point to my central nervous system. Well, the mechanical version. It doesn't hurt, the twitching's involuntary. Promise."

The sensor display had lit up. Spencer released his death grip on the conduit's base; it stuck in place, buried in Ryan's skin. A million tiny voices in Spencer's brain began screaming wrong and heresy.

As if he heard them too, Ryan murmured, "When I first woke up, I tried to get them to -- I wouldn't listen to anything they said, and I took off first chance I got, before they could do anything else. Fucking stupid. I've had to figure it all out on my own. I still malfunction all the time. Most of this -- it's all experimental. I don't think they expected me to survive. Things keep going wrong I don't know how to fix, you know how lousy I am with mechanical repairs."

Spencer remembered Ryan opening the door, hunched in on himself. He bit his lip and focused on the sensor display. There were readings for protein levels, energy consumption, and hormone stasis; it wasn't that different from a ship diagnostic. "Yeah. Good thing I'm a lot better with that shit than you are."

Ryan craned his neck again, looking back at him. He was shaking. "Are you -- ?"

"Shhh." Spencer touched his fingers against the back of Ryan's collarbone, right where he'd forced the bone back into place. There was a faint burn mark from the wire in Ryan's skin and he touched beside that, too. "Let me just...fiddle with this for a bit, okay?"

"Okay," Ryan huffed. The oxygen levels dropped sharply on the screen. Spencer blinked, goosebumps rising on his arms. Ryan faced forward again, his head slightly bowed, while Spencer bit at his lip and tried not to freak out. This was...Ryan. All of him contained in a digital readout on a little screen in Spencer's hands. The meter rose and fell steadily between oxygen and carbon, cyclical, automatic.

After a few minutes of scrolling through the numbers, he said quietly, "Your PH levels are too high. You need to eat fewer lactose products."

The tiny arrow on the oxygen meter fluttered low as Ryan breathed out. "Oh."

Something bubbled up in Spencer's stomach and he was startled when it came out as a hoarse giggle.

"Are you," Ryan twisted to look over his shoulder, "laughing?"

"No," Spencer giggled. He couldn't stop. He was exhausted and his throat hurt like hell. "I don't know why, it's not funny, just." He shook his head. This was hysteria, maybe. The start of madness.

Ryan paused then said with absolute gravity, "Do you mind not laughing while your sensor tip is still in me?"

Spencer pitched forward, pressing his face against the side of Ryan's head and shaking. He felt Ryan's smile against his cheek, heard a soft chuckle in his ear; he wrapped one arm tight around Ryan's waist and let himself laugh.

 

\--

 

"That's mostly grafts," Ryan said, flexing his toes. The steel-gray 'skin' of his feet stretched over his narrow metatarsal bones. "All the bones and muscles are still me, the burns didn't go too deep. They couldn't do a regular skin graft, though -- I didn't have enough skin left anywhere else to donate." His lips twisted upward at the ends.

Spencer crouched down beside the chair and lifted one of Ryan's feet in his hand, glancing up. Ryan didn't react as Spencer ran one thumb across the top of his foot. All the skin from Ryan's toes up his ankles and tapering off at his knees was a soft gray in color, but it felt real to the touch. A bit cooler, maybe.

"They made do with some urethane over silicone," Ryan went on. "Pretty old-fashioned stuff, they spent most of their best work on my chest and hands. I think they were going to do some cosmetics to make it look real, but by then I was awake and, well, trying to hit them with anything I could reach."

When Spencer shifted his grip, running fingers across the sole, Ryan's whole leg jerked. He looked up quickly and Ryan pulled a face. "There's still a little -- on the bottom."

Spencer ducked down low, craning his neck. Inside the arch of Ryan's foot was a narrow strip of pink skin, barely three inches wide, that blended into the gray around it. He sent Ryan a crooked grin. "Ticklish, Ross?"

Ryan looked down at him through the tips of his hair. "Right there, yeah. I don't have much feeling in the rest."

Spencer carefully set Ryan's foot back down on the floor before reaching for the other one.

They were in Ryan's small, barren kitchen, Ryan sitting in a chair in his boxers with his hands resting on top of his thighs and Spencer circled around him making mental notations. He'd said I should maybe, just so I can and Ryan had said, okay. In the watery light of day he could see that almost half the surface of Ryan's body was metal. Probably plenty of his insides, too.

"A lot of my right arm is artificial," Ryan supplied. Spencer blinked, still unused to their old, silent ways of communicating; Ryan just counted parts on his fingers, his voice matter-of-fact. He might as well be listing star systems. He didn't look at Spencer, though. "All of the shoulder -- when they found me there were just a few tendons holding the rest of the arm in place. My teeth were all knocked out, my jaw was broken. My vertebrae have this weird kind of stretchy stuff holding them together...I think Pete called it synpo, synthetic polymers. It degrades all the time, so they actually had to reprogram some of my cells to produce the polymers on their own. One of my lungs, obviously. The other one is still real. My heart's still real too, but with everything else that's been replaced, that's the most vulnerable part."

He paused, as if waiting for a reaction. Spencer only put one hand on Ryan's bare shoulder and nudged him forward until Ryan was bent all the way forward over his own lap. Besides the square metal controller implanted in the back of his neck and the metal ribbons of his artificial ribs, there were two rows of small, round metal objects that ran parallel to Ryan's spine. Forty-eight of them, Spencer realized without even having to count, two for each vertebrae to pick up the nerve signals from Ryan's spine.

When Spencer passed a fingertip over one of the sensors in his middle back, Ryan breathed in sharply. Spencer froze, curling his hand up. "Hurts?"

"Naw," Ryan said, muffled. He'd dropped his chin down onto his chest. "Just sensitive."

"Sorry."

"S'okay. It -- feels like you're touching my chest. Like, a phantom touch or something."

Spencer shifted his hand back up and touched the first sensors just under Ryan's soft hairline. "Where's that?"

"I think...back of my throat, it feels like a tingle."

"Okay." Spencer frowned as he moved down Ryan's back, touching each sensor in turn. He really needed to write this shit down but for now he just listened to Ryan's murmured responses -- "My hands." "My stomach." "My right knee." -- and tried to remember it for later.

Gathering himself, he circled back to the front of the chair and knelt down for a closer look at Ryan's torso. For all that they hadn't waited on his consent, whoever had put Ryan back together really put some effort into the structure of his body. The weight of metal in one half of his chest was off-balanced by just the right amount of steel-enforced ribs on the other side. Good news for his spine. The last thing he needed now was a case of scoliosis. Spencer counted six sensor nodes implanted along Ryan's ribcage on the right side, one every few inches. They were smaller than the ones along his spine, invisible to the naked eye; they felt like tiny lumps when he trailed a fingertip in just the right spot and picked up the change in density. Those probably helped control his abdominal and lower back muscles.

He sat back on his heels and froze.

"Um," Ryan said. He was blushing. He can still blush, Spencer thought. That was interesting...though not as interesting as what other parts of Ryan's body were doing. "Now might be a good time to mention that I, um, haven't gotten laid in a while."

"Huh," Spencer said. He still had one of his hands on Ryan's waist, his fingers splayed, and the other curled over his right knee.

"Right. So you don't get to hold this against me." Ryan's voice only sounded a little bit strained. He added, "At the moment I'm just happy to find out that I can _get_ turned on." His laugh, that did sound frayed.

"Right," Spencer agreed. "Right." He dropped his gaze to the parallel arcs of metal along Ryan's left side and thought, right, of course not. Of course Ryan couldn't have -- he was anathema. This wasn't something he could show to just anyone; a few mechanical parts he could probably hide with clothes or dim lights, but not this. Even if someone didn't have an Alliance callcode branded into their foreheads, prejudice against cyber-enhancement was high in most parts of the known universe. In fact, Spencer realized, he might be the first person to touch Ryan at all since the people who'd recreated him.

"Spencer?" Ryan asked, his voice wavering on the second syllable.

"Yeah," Spencer answered automatically. He'd zoned out again, staring at Ryan's chest. He cleared his throat. "Fraternization was discouraged."

"What?"

"Fraternization in the ranks was strongly discouraged. It was bad for morale. Supposedly. We all thought it'd be great for morale, but what did we know?"

"Huh," Ryan said after a long moment of silence. Spencer looked up. Ryan was biting his lip around the tiniest smile; it grew as Spencer watched.

A weird giddy feeling bubbled up in his stomach. "Don't laugh at me, asshole."

"I'm not." He totally was, on the inside, Spencer could see it. "You have...fraternized before, though. Right?"

Spencer rolled his eyes. "No, I've been saving myself. I want to be pure for when we finally discover alien life, I'm sure they'll want some virgin conquests. Fuck off, Ryan."

Ryan put his hands up. His metal fingers shined dully. They were so close, they almost brushed Spencer's face. "Hey, you're the one ran off to join a holy crusade at age fifteen."

Spencer had managed not to think about that for a while, not since he'd been lying in bed this morning listening to Ryan breathe. "It wasn't that holy."

The familiar weight settled around them, unspoken words clattering down on the kitchen floor. Ryan must have sensed it too, because he put his hands back down on his thighs; they lay curled like metal shavings in his lap. Spencer swallowed, licked his lips. His pulse beat fast in his cheekbones. The base of his throat ached. "I should tell you..." he faltered.

Ryan leaned down to kiss him. The gentlest press of lips. Spencer let his eyes fall shut, shuddering hard.

"Later," Ryan murmured when he moved back. "Later, okay?"

Spencer sure wasn't going to argue. Instead he caught Ryan by his hips and tugged. The chair creaked warningly as Ryan slid out and down.

They wound up huddled on the grimy floor of Ryan's kitchen, exchanging slow kisses, sliding hands everywhere they could. Ryan was less shy than Spencer had always imagined he would be -- and he had imagined plenty, a burn of desire buried deep where the crack in his heart hadn't reached. This version of Ryan wasn't what he'd expected, with his bold mouth and metal-cool fingers slipping through Spencer's short hair, but he was everything that Spencer wanted and he leaned his face against Ryan's for a moment. His own body was miraculously whole, but for a blinding moment he felt just as relieved as Ryan to discover that he could want.

He slid his hands over Ryan's sides until his fingers met on his back; they didn't have far to go. "Still fucking skinny," he murmured.

"You like it, don't lie."

Spencer heard the unspoken question and answered by sending a fingernail down over the sensor nodes along Ryan's spine. Metal and bone moved under his palms as Ryan arched, gasping, and Spencer thought of all the tiny delicate nerves, synthetic muscle fibers, and grafted bones that worked together in the smallest movements. He pressed his mouth to Ryan's shoulder.

By the time he reached the sensors in the small of Ryan's back, Ryan was yanking at the hem of his shirt. "Off," he growled. "Clothes off." He didn't wait for an answer, just pushed Spencer backwards onto the floor then shoved his own boxers down his hips. There were scars in the skin there, a whole knot of shiny pink perched on the outer edge of his right hipbone, and Spencer caught his own lip between his teeth.

Ryan caught him looking and froze, his frantic movements wavering like cut string. "I." He rocked back, his hands twitching as though he wanted to cover himself but didn't know where to start.

Catching his hands, Spencer yanked him forward then winced as Ryan landed on him with a thud. "Y'okay?" he gasped.

"Yeah," Ryan said, his mouth smushed against Spencer's hair. He shifted then moaned as Spencer bent a knee across his unscarred hip, pulling him in closer. "Fuck."

"Hurry the fuck up." Spencer bent to mouth at the side of Ryan's neck.

"Fucking pushy."

"You take too long." Spencer arched, trying to work a hand between them, but Ryan's palms pressed down hard on his shoulders, stilling him.

"I want to do this," Ryan said huskily. Spencer pulled his hand away and let it rest on the floor.

The lattice along Ryan's fingers moved smoothly at the waistband of his trousers; something about that deftness made Spencer relax again, give into this. When Ryan settled over him again, his eyes dark and wide and a shiver building in his muscles, Spencer caught him easily. He kept Ryan steady, one hand on his side and the other on his chest, and moved where Ryan wanted him to move, followed the rhythm that Ryan built, until they were lined up and thrusting against each others' hips.

The weight of everything else, what Spencer had done, what had hurt Ryan so horribly, slipped off to settle somewhere else for a little while.

The floor was sticky against Spencer's back, small bits of dirt sticking in his skin and the gathering sweat making him slip easier as he moved with Ryan, arching up to meet him. Metal touched his skin, curled around his cock as Ryan gripped him, and Spencer shuddered. It hurt a little, not enough give, but he still tried to thrust up and groaned when Ryan's weight on his hips brought him up short.

"You take," he panted, "too fucking, hurry up, Ryan, Ryan."

"No," Ryan said. He'd stilled his own body except for the movement of his hand, jerking Spencer off and just watching him. On an upstroke he caught a bit of precome and oh, oh, that changed it, made Ryan's metal fingers slide even smoother over Spencer's cock than his real ones.

Ryan's chest fascinated Spencer; he ran his fingertips back and forth between the skin and metal. It felt like a miracle, all of it, and he wanted. They hadn't gotten to that. That part still belonged to him...except, when he came Spencer groaned out, "I love you," just like that, like something he'd been saying for years. So maybe it belonged to Ryan.

Ryan was panting, enough that Spencer rested fingers around his sides with fuzzy-headed concern; but Ryan only ground their hips together, picking up the rhythm again. The brush of his cock against Spencer's was almost too much, over-stimulation, but he still pulled Ryan down closer and stroked hands down his back until he shuddered with release.

Somehow in the same hazy aftermath Spencer found himself wondering about all the minute body workings of thatand burst out laughing. Slumping down, Ryan breathed hot against his collarbone. "F'koff."

"I'm not," Spencer coughed. His voice hurt. He might possibly have been moaning a lot. He wrapped his arms around Ryan's shoulders to hold him there. They lay on the kitchen floor in silence, catching their breaths. Those extra metallic parts had increased Ryan's weight; it hurt a little to have all of him lying on Spencer's ribcage. He didn't let go.

"Spence, I -- I thought about you, while you were gone," Ryan murmured, his lips catching on the front of Spencer's shirt.

"Nice to hear." The upper edge of Ryan's ear was notched with scars, cartilage burned away; Spencer pressed a kiss there.

Ryan grunted petulantly and squirmed closer. The ceiling had been stained in brown rings. Spencer lazily counted them in his head. Ryan shifted back a little and Spencer shivered as cool air washed over the slippery mess of sweat, clothes, and come between them. It was fucking filthy and awesome and he laughed again just to feel the dust shake free from his lungs. Ryan grinned down at him. "Wanna get off the floor?"

"Yes fucking please. I can see whole species evolving under your sink."

Ryan huffed but said, "We can try the shower again, if you want."

"I'll get out the sledgehammer," Spencer said with a smile. When he looked up, though, Ryan's expression had turned solemn. "What?"

Without looking away from Spencer's face, Ryan said, "Whatever happened while you were gone, whatever they made you do -- "

Spencer's hands tightened on Ryan's arms. "Not yet, Ryan, don't -- "

"You don't have to tell me. I don't have to hear it. You're still you and I know you, Spence, I do."

The inside of Spencer's chest shuddered, a change in gravity only he could feel. He closed his eyes. "You'll -- you won't, like...I just want to come with you."

"I want you to." Ryan's hand stroked down the side of his face. It had to be his right hand: the fingers shook, still weak. Spencer breathed out. It made some kind of awful sense that they'd both done more damage to themselves than anyone else ever had; but Spencer had hurt other people, too, millions, maybe -- maybe billions. He shouldn't be able to do this. This shouldn't even be an option for him --

"Spencer, hey, come back. Breathe." Spencer snapped his eyes open. Above him, Ryan's face was creased with concern. "It doesn't matter to me, okay? You don't have to tell me."

"Yeah, I do," Spencer murmured. "I do. Just...not yet, okay?"

"Okay," Ryan said, so steady and accepting. Like he really would let Spencer stay no matter what he'd become.

The thought made Spencer sit up, catching Ryan's arms again just as he sat back, because, yes. Their noses brushed. Ryan stilled, looking back at him so close. "You're still you, too," Spencer told him. He slid one hand down Ryan's side, fingertips slipping over his scarred skin and metal ribs. "This is still you."

Ryan's mouth lost its smile and crooked soft, vulnerable. Spencer kissed it, then bent to kiss the back of the hand that had touched him, too. Ryan's metal felt cool against his swollen lips. "You could be half frog and I would still," he confessed in a whisper, smiling a little as Ryan's face pushed against the side of his neck.

"Ribbit, ribbit," Ryan said, then mumbled, "I thought about you so much, even before you left, just, I always thought about you."

Spencer pulled him closer, not minding the places where Ryan's hard edges dug into him. Besides their breathing, there was no other sound for miles. Tomorrow they'd leave, before that silence became a permanent one; from there, Spencer had no idea where they'd go, but he was no longer afraid of going alone.


End file.
